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Rome or Reason. 



A Series of Articles Contributed to the North American Review 

BY 

CARDINAL MANNING 

AND 

COL ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. 



ALSO THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES : 

IS DIVORCE IVRONG? 

a discussion. 

Ge?ieral Introduction, . . Rev. S. W. Dike, LLD. 

The Roma?i Catholic View, . Cardinal Gibbons 

An Episcopalian View, . Bishop Henry C. Potter 

An Agnostic View, . Col. Robert G. Ingersoll 

ONLY COMPLETE AND AUTHORIZED EDITION. 



C. P. FARRELL, PUBLISHER, 
NEW YORK, 

1898. 



BX\771 
1 8^6 



COPYRIGHT BY 
ALLAN THORNDIKE RJCE, 

1888 and 1889. 






PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. 



The Publisher takes this occasion to return his thanks 
to the North American Review for the special permission to 
reprint in book form these valuable articles, under the pro- 
tection of their copyright. 

C. P. Farrell. 

New York, i8g8. 



ROME OR REASON. 



The Gladstone-Ingersoll Controversy. 



THE CHURCH ITS OWN WITNESS. 

BY 

Cardinal Manning. 

THE Vatican Council, in its Decree on Faith has these 
words : "The Church itself, by its marvelous propaga- 
tion, its eminent sanctity, its inexhaustible fruitfulness in all 
good things, its catholic unity and invincible stability, is a vast 
and perpetual motive of credibility, and an irrefragable witness 
of its own Divine legation." * Its Divine Founder said : "I 
am the light of the world;" and, to His Apostles, He said 
also, " Ye are the light of the world," and of His Church He 
added, " A city seated on a hill cannot be hid." The Vatican 
Council says, " The Church is its own witness." My purpose 
is to draw out this assertion more fully. 

These words affirm that the Church is self-evident, as light 
is to the eye, and through sense, to the intellect. Next to the 
sun at noonday, there is nothing in the world more manifest 
than the one visible Universal Church. Both the faith and the 
infidelity of the world bear witness to it. It is loved and hated, 
trusted and feared, served and assaulted, honored and blas- 
phemed : it is Christ or Antichrist, the Kingdom of God or 
* " Const. Dogm. de Fide Catholica, c. iii. (5) 



6 ROME OR REASON. 

the imposture of Satan . It pervades the civilized world. No 
man and no nation can ignore it, none can be indifferent to it. 
Why is all this ? How is its existence to be accounted for ? 

Let me suppose that I am an unbeliever in Christianity, and 
that some friend should make me promise to examine the 
evidence to show that Christianity is a Divine revelation ; I 
should then sift and test the evidence as strictly as if it were in 
a court of law, and in a cause of life and death ; my will would 
be in suspense : it would in no way control the process of my 
intellect. If it had any inclination from the equilibrium, it 
would be towards mercy and hope ; but this would not add a 
feather's weight to the evidence, nor sway the intellect a hair's 
breadth. 

After the examination has been completed, and my intellect 
convinced, the evidence being sufficient to prove that Chris- 
tianity is a divine revelation, nevertheless I am not yet a 
Christian. All this sifting brings me to the conclusion of a 
chain of reasoning ; but I am not yet a believer. The last act 
of reason has brought me to the brink of the first act of faith. 
They are generically distinct and separable. The acts of reason 
are intellectual, and jealous of the interference of the will. The 
act of faith is an imperative act of the will, founded on and 
justified by the process and conviction of the intellect. Hith- 
erto I have been a critic : henceforward, if I will, I become a 
disciple. 

It may here be objected that no man can so far suspend the 
inclination of the will when the question is, has God indeed 
spoken to man or no ? is the revealed law of purity, generosity, 
perfection, divine, or only the poetry of imagination ? Can a 
man be indifferent between two such sides of the problem ? 
Will he not desire the higher and better side to be true ? and 
if he desire, will he not incline to the side that he desires to 
find true ? Can a moral being be absolutely indifferent between 
two such issues ? and can two such issues be equally attractive 



ROME OR REASON. 7 

to a moral agent ? Can it be indifferent and all the same to 
us whether God has made Himself and His will known to us 
or not ? Is there no attraction in light, no repulsion in dark- 
ness? Does not the intrinsic and eternal distinction of good 
and evil make itself felt in spite of the will? Are we not re- 
sponsible to " receive the truth in the love of it?" Neverthe- 
less, evidence has its own limits and quantities, and cannot be 
made more or less by any act of the will. And yet, what is 
good or bad, high or mean, lovely or hateful, ennobling or 
degrading, must attract or repel men as they are better or 
worse in their moral sense ; for an equilibrium between good 
and evil, to God or to man, is impossible. 

The last act of my reason, then, is distinct from my first act 
of faith precisely in this : so long as I was uncertain I suspended 
the inclination of my will, as an act of fidelity to conscience 
and of loyalty to truth ; but the process once complete, and 
the conviction once attained, my will imperatively constrains 
me to believe, and I become a disciple of a Divine revelation. 

My friend next tells me that there are Christian Scriptures, 
and I go through precisely the same process of critical ex- 
amination and final conviction, the last act of reasoning pre- 
ceding, as before, the first act of faith. 

He then tells me that there is a Church claiming to be 
divinely founded, divinely guarded, and divinely guided in its 
custody of Christianity and of the Christian Scriptures. 

Once more I have the same twofold process of reasoning 
and of believing to go through. 

There is, however, this difference in the subject-matter : 
Christianity is an order of supernatural truth appealing intel- 
lectually to my reason ; the Christian Scriptures are voiceless, 
and need a witness. They cannot prove their own mission, 
much less their own authenticity or inspiration. But the 
Church is visible to the eye, audible to the ear, self- manifesting 



8 ROME OR REASON. 

and self-asserting : I cannot escape from it. If I go to the 
east, it is there ; if I go to the west, it is there also. If I stay 
at home, it is before me, seated on the hill ; if I turn away 
from it, I am surrounded by its light. It pursues me and calls 
to me. I cannot deny its existence ; I cannot be indifferent 
to it ; I must either listen to it or willfully stop my ears ; I must 
heed it or defy it, love it or hate it. But my first attitude 
towards it is to try it with forensic strictness, neither pro- 
nouncing it to be Christ nor Antichrist till I have tested its 
origin, claim, and character. Let us take down the case in 
short-hand. 

i. It says that it interpenetrates all the nations of the civil- 
ized world. In some it holds the whole nation in its unity, in 
others it holds fewer ; but in all it is present, visible, audible, 
naturalized^ and known as the one Catholic Church, a name 
that none can appropriate. Though often claimed and con- 
troversially assumed, none can retain it ; it falls ofT. The 
world knows only one Catholic Church, and always restores 
the name to the right owner. 

2. It is not a national body, but extra-national, accused of 
its foreign relations and foreign dependence. It is international, 
and independent in a supernational unity. 

3. In faith, divine worship, sacred ceremonial, discipline, 
government, from the highest to the lowest, it is the same in 
every place. 

4. It speaks all languages in the civilized world. 

5. It is obedient to one Head, outside of all nations, except 
one only ; and in that nation, his headship is not national but 
world-wide. 

6. The world-wide sympathy of the Church in all lands with 
its Head has been manifested in our days, and before our eyes, 
by a series of public assemblages in Rome, of which nothing 
like or second to it can be found. In 1854, 350 Bishops of all 



ROME OR REASON. 9 

nations surrounded their Head when he defined the Immaculate 
Conception. In 1862, 400 Bishops assembled at the canoniza- 
tion of the Martyrs of Japan. In 1867, 500 Bishops came to 
keep the eighteenth centenary of St. Peter's martyrdom. In 
1870, 700 Bishops assembled in the Vatican Council. On the 
Feast of the Epiphany, 1870, the Bishops of thirty nations 
during two whole hours made profession of faith in their own 
languages, kneeling before their head. Add to this, that in 
1869, in the sacerdotal jubilee of Pius IX., Rome was filled for 
months by pilgrims from all lands in Europe and beyond the 
sea, from the Old World and from the New, bearing all manner 
of gifts and oblations to the Head of the Universal Church. 
To this, again, must be added the world-wide outcry and pro- 
test of all the Catholic unity against the seizure and sacrilege 
of September, 1870, when Rome was taken by the Italian 
Revolution. 

7. All this came to pass not only by reason of the great 
love of the Catholic world for Pius IX., but because they 
revered him as the successor of St. Peter and the Vicar of Jesus 
Christ. For that undying reason the same events have been 
reproduced in the time of Leo XIII. In the early months of 
this year Rome was once more filled with pilgrims of all 
nations, coming in thousands as representatives of millions in 
all nations, to celebrate the sacerdotal jubilee of the Sovereign 
Pontiff. The courts of the Vatican could not find room for 
the multitude of gifts and offerings of every kind which were 
sent from all quarters of the world. 

8. These things are here said, not because of any other 
importance, but because they set forth in the most visible and 
self-evident way the living unity and the luminous universality 
of the One Catholic and Roman Church. 

9. What has thus far been said is before our eyes at this 
hour. It is no appeal to history, but to a visible and palpable 



IO ROME OR REASON. 

fact. Men may explain it as they will ; deny it, they cannot. 
They see the Head of the Church year by year speaking to 
the nations of the world ; treating with Empires, Republics 
and Governments. There is no other man on earth that can 
so bear himself. Neither from Canterbury nor from Constan- 
tinople can such a voice go forth to which rulers and people 
listen. 

This is the century of revolutions. Rome has in our time 
been besieged three times ; three Popes have been driven out 
of it, two have been shut up in the Vatican. The city is now 
full of the Revolution. The whole Church has been tormented 
by Falck laws, Mancini laws, and Crispi laws. An unbeliever 
in Germany said some years ago, " The net is now drawn so 
tight about the Church, that if it escapes this time I will 
believe in it." Whether he believes, or is even alive now to 
believe, I cannot say. 

Nothing thus far has been said as proof. The visible, pal- 
pable facts, which are at this moment before the eyes of all men, 
speak for themselves. There is one, and only one, world- 
wide unity of which these things can be said. It is a fact and 
a phenomenon for which an intelligible account must be 
rendered. If it be only a human system built up by the intel- 
lect, will and energy of men, let the adversaries prove it. The 
burden is upon them ; and they will have more to do as we 
go on. 

Thus far we have rested upon the evidence of sense and fact. 
We must now go on to history and reason. 

Every religion and every religious body known to history 
has varied from itself and broken up. Brahminism has given 
birth to Buddhism ; Mahometanism is parted into the Arabian 
and European Khalifates ; the Greek schism into the Russian, 
Constantinopolitan, and Bulgarian autocephalous fragment ; 
Protestantism into its multitudinous diversities. All have 



ROME OR REASON. II 

departed from their original type, and all are continually de- 
veloping new and irreconcilable, intellectual and ritualistic, 
diversities and repulsions. How is it that, with all diversities 
of language, civilization, race, interest, and conditions, social 
and political, including persecution and warfare, the Catholic 
nations are at this day, even when in warfare, in unchanged 
unity of faith, communion, worship and spiritual sympathy 
with each other and with their Head? This needs a rational 
explanation. 

It may be said in answer, endless divisions have come out 
of the Church, from Arius to Photius, and from Photius to 
Luther. 

Yes, but they all came out. There is the difference. 
They did not remain in the Church, corrupting the faith. 
They came out, and ceased to belong to the Catholic unity, 
as a branch broken from a tree ceases to belong to the tree. 
But the identity of the tree remains the same. A branch is 
not a tree, nor a tree a branch. A tree may lose branches, 
but it rests upon its root, and renews its loss. Not so the 
religions, so to call them, that have broken away from unity. 
Not one has retained its members or its doctrines. Once 
separated from the sustaining unity 01 the Church, all separa- 
tions lose their spiritual cohesion, and then their intellectual 
identity. Ramus prcecisas arescit. 

For the present it is enough to say that no human legislation, 
authority or constraint can ever create internal unity of intel- 
lect and will ; and that the diversities and contradictions 
generated by all human systems prove the absence of Divine 
authority. Variations or contradictions are proof of the ab- 
sence of a Divine mission to mankind. All natural causes run 
to disintegration. Therefore, they can render no account of 
the world-wide unity of the One Universal Church. 

Such, then, are the facts before our eyes at this day. We 
will seek out the origin of the body or system called the Cath- 



12 ROME OR REASON. 

olic Church, and pass at once to its outset eighteen hundred 
years ago. 

I affirm, then, three things : (i) First, that no adequate 
account can be given of this undeniable fact from natural 
causes ; (2) that the history of the Catholic Church demands 
causes above nature ; and (3) that it has always claimed for 
itself a Divine origin and Divine authority. 

I. And, first, before we examine what it was and what it 
has done, we will recall to mind what was the world in the 
midst of which it arose. 

The most comprehensive and complete description of the 
old world, before Christianity came in upon it, is given in the 
first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. Mankind had once 
the knowledge of God : that knowledge was obscured by the 
passions of sense ; in the darkness of the human intellect, with 
the light of nature still before them, the nations worshiped the 
creature — that is, by pantheism, polytheism, idolatry ; and, 
having lost the knowledge of God and of His perfections, they 
lost the knowledge of their own nature and of its laws, even of 
the natural and rational laws, which thenceforward ceased to 
guide, restrain, or govern them. They became perverted and 
inverted with every possible abuse, defeating the end and 
destroying the powers of creation. The lights of nature were 
put out, and the world rushed headlong into confusions, of 
which the beasts that perish were innocent. This is analytically 
the history of all nations but one. A line of light still shone 
from Adam to Enoch, from Enoch to Abraham, to whom the 
command was given, "Walk before Me and be perfect." 
And it ran on from Abraham to Caiaphas, who crucified the 
founder of Christianity. Through all anthropomorphisms of 
thought and language this line of light still passed inviolate 
and inviolable. But in the world, on either side of that radiant 
stream, the whole earth was dark. The intellectual and moral 
state of the Greek world may be measured in its highest 



ROME OR REASON. 13 

excellence in Athens ; and of the Roman world in Rome. The 
state of Athens — its private, domestic, and public morality — 
may be seen in Aristophanes. 

The state of Rome is visible in Juvenal, and in the fourth 
book of St. Augustine's " City of God." There was only one 
evil wanting. The world was not Atheist. Its polytheism 
was the example and the warrant of all forms of moral abomin- 
ations. Imitary quod colis plunged the nations in crime. Their 
theology was their degradation ; their text-book of an elaborate 
corruption of intellect and will. 

Christianity came in "the fullness of time." What tha 
fullness may mean, is one of the mysteries of times and seasons 
which it is not for us to know. But one motive for the long 
delay of four thousand years is not far to seek. It gave time, 
full and ample, for the utmost development and consolidation 
of all the falsehood and evil of which the intellect and will of 
man are capable. The four great empires were each of them 
the concentration of a supreme effort of human power. The 
second inherited from the first, the third from both, the fourth 
from all three. It was, as it was foretold or described, as a 
beast, " exceeding terrible ; his teeth and claws were of iron ; 
he devoured and broke in pieces ; and the rest he stamped 
upon with his feet." * The empire of man over man was never 
so widespread, so absolute, so hardened into one organized 
mass, as in Imperial Rome. The world had never seen a 
military power so disciplined, irresistible, invincible ; a legisla- 
tion so just, so equitable, so strong in its execution ; a govern- 
ment so universal, so local, so minute. It seemed to be 
imperishable. Rome was called the eternal. The religions 
of all nations were enshrined in Dea Roma ; adopted, prac- 
ticed openly, and taught. They were all religiones licitce, 
known to the law ; not tolerated only, but recognized. The 

* Daniel, vii. 19. 



14 ROME OR REASON. 

theologies of Egypt, Greece, and of the Latin world, met in 
an empyreum, consecrated and guarded by the Imperial law, 
and administered by the Pontifex Maximus. No fanaticism 
ever surpassed the religious cruelties of Rome. Add to all 
this the colluvies of false philosophies of every land, and of 
every date. They both blinded and hardened the intellect of 
public opinion and of private men against the invasion of any- 
thing except contempt, and hatred of both the philosophy of 
sophists and of the religion of the people. Add to all this the 
sensuality of the most refined and of the grossest luxury the 
world had ever seen, and a moral confusion and corruption 
which violated every law of nature. 

The god of this world had built his city. From foundation 
to parapet, everything that the skill and power of man could 
do had been done without stint of means or limit of will. The 
Divine hand was stayed, or rather, as St. Augustine says, an 
unsurpassed natural greatness was the reward of certain natural 
virtues, degraded as they were in unnatural abominations. 
Rome was the climax of the power of man without God, the 
apotheosis of the human will, the direct and supreme antag- 
onist of God in His own world. In this the fullness of time 
was come. Man built all this for himself. Certainly, man 
could not also build the City of God. They are not the work 
of one and the same architect, who capriciously chose to build 
first the city of confusion, suspending for a time his skill and 
power to build some day the City of God. Such a hypothesis 
is folly. Of two things, one. Disputers must choose one or 
the other. Both cannot be asserted, and the assertion needs 
no answer — it refutes itself. So much for the first point. 

II. In the reign of Augustus, and in a remote and powerless 
Oriental race, a Child was born in a stable of a poor Mother. 
For thirty years He lived a hidden life ; for three years He 
preached the Kingdom of God, and gave laws hitherto un- 



ROME OR REASON. 15 

known to men. He died in ignominy upon the Cross ; on the 
third day He rose again ; and after forty days He was seen no 
more. This unknown Man created the world-wide unity of 
intellect and will which is visible to the eye, and audible, in all 
languages, to the ear. It is in harmony with the reason and 
moral nature of all nations, in all ages, to this day. What 
proportion is there between the cause and the effect? What 
power was there in this isolated Man ? What unseen virtues 
went out of Him to change the world ? For change the world 
He did ; and that not in the line or on the level of nature as 
men had corrupted it, but in direct contradiction to all that 
was then supreme in the world. He taught the dependence 
of the intellect against its self-trust, the submission of the will 
against its license, the subjugation of the passions by temperate 
control or by absolute subjection against their willful indul- 
gence. This was to reverse what men believed to be the laws 
of nature : to make water climb upward and fire to point 
downward. He taught mortification of the lusts of the flesh, 
contempt of the lusts of the eyes, and hatred of the pride of 
life. What hope was there that such a teacher should convert 
imperial Rome ? that such a doctrine should exorcise the full- 
ness of human pride and lust ? Yet so it has come to pass ; 
and how ? Twelve men more obscure than Himself, absolutely 
without authority or influence of this world, preached through- 
out the empire and beyond it. They asserted two facts : the 
one, that God had been made man ; the other, that He died 
and rose again. What could be more incredible? To the 
Jews the unity and spirituality of God were axioms of reason 
and faith ; to the Gentiles, however cultured, the resurrection 
of the flesh was impossible. The Divine Person Who had died 
and risen could not be called in evidence as the chief witness. 
He could not be produced in court. Could anything be more 
suspicious if credible, or less credible even if He were there to 



1 6 ROME OR REASON. 

say so ? All that they could do was to say, " We knew Him 
for three years, both before His death and after He rose from 
the dead. If you will believe us, you will believe what we say. 
If you will not believe us, we can say no more. He is not here, 
but in heaven. We cannot call him down." It is true, as we 
read, that Peter cured a lame man at the gate of the Temple. 
The Pharisees could not deny it, but they would not believe what 
Peter said ; they only told him to hold his tongue. And yet 
thousands in one day in Jerusalem believed in the Incarnation 
and the Resurrection ; and when the Apostles were scattered 
by persecution, wherever they went men believed their word. 
The most intense persecution was from the Jews, the people 
of faith and of Divine traditions. In the name of God and of 
religion they stoned Stephen, and sent Saul to persecute at 
Damascus. More than this, they stirred up the Romans in 
every place. As they had forced Pilate to crucify Jesus of 
Nazareth, so they swore to slay Paul. And yet, in spite of 
all, the faith spread. 

It is true, indeed, that the Empire of Alexander, the spread 
of the Hellenistic Greek, the prevalence of Greek in Rome 
itself, the Roman roads which made the Empire traversable, 
the Roman peace which sheltered the preachers of the faith in 
the outset of their work, gave them facilities to travel and to 
be understood. But these were only external facilities, which 
in no way rendered more credible or more acceptable the 
voice of penance and mortification, or the mysteries of the 
faith, which was immutably "to the Jews a stumbling-block 
and to the Greeks foolishness." It was in changeless opposi- 
tion to nature as man had marred it ; but it was in absolute 
harmony with nature as God had made it to His own like- 
ness. Its power was its persuasiveness ; and its persuasiveness 
was in its conformity to the highest and noblest aspirations 
and aims of the soul in man. The master-key so long lost 



ROME OR REASON. 1 7 

was found at last ; and its conformity to the wards of the 
lock was its irrefragable witness to its own mission and 
message. 

But if it is beyond belief that Christianity in its outset made 
good its foothold by merely human causes and powers, how 
much more does this become incredible in every age as we 
come down from the first century to the nineteenth, and from 
the Apostolic mission to the world-wide Church, Catholic and 
Roman, at this day. 

Not only did the world in the fullness of its power give to 
the Christian faith no help to root or to spread itself, but it 
wreaked all the fullness of its power upon it to uproot and to 
destroy it. Of the first thirty Pontiffs in Rome, twenty-nine 
were martyred. Ten successive persecutions, or rather one 
universal and continuous persecution of two hundred years, 
with ten more bitter excesses of enmity in every province of 
the Empire, did all that man can do to extinguish the Chris- 
tian name. The Christian name may be blotted out here and 
there in blood, but the Christian faith can nowhere be slain. 
It is inscrutable, and beyond the reach of man. In nothing 
is the blood of the martyrs more surely the seed of the faith. 
Every martyrdom was a witness to the faith, and the ten per- 
secutions were the sealing of the work of the twelve Apostles. 
The destroyer defeated himself. Christ crucified was visibly 
set forth before all the nations, the world was a Calvary, and 
the blood of the martyrs preached in every tongue the Passion 
of Jesus Christ. The world did its worst, and ceased only for 
weariness and conscious defeat. 

Then came the peace, and with peace the peril of the 
Church. The world outside had failed ; the world inside 
began to work. It no longer destroyed life ; it perverted the 
intellect, and, through intellectual perversion, assailed the faith 
at its centre. The Angel of light preached heresy. The 



1 8 ROME OR REASON. 

Baptismal Creed was assailed all along the line ; Gnosticism 
assailed the Father and Creator of all things ; Arianism, the 
God-head of the Son ; Nestorianism, the unity of His person; 
Monophysites, the two natures ; Monothelites, the divine and 
human wills ; Macedonians, the person of the Holy Ghost. 
So throughout the centuries, from Nicaea to the Vatican, 
every article has been in succession perverted by heresy and 
defined by the Church. But of this we shall speak hereafter. 
If the human intellect could fasten its perversions on the Chris- 
tian faith, it would have done so long ago ; and if the Christian 
faith had been guarded by no more than human intellect, it 
would long ago have been disintegrated, as we see in every 
religion outside the unity of the one Catholic Church. There 
is no example in which fragmentary Christianities have not 
departed from their original type. No human system is im- 
mutable ; no thing human is changeless. The human intellect, 
therefore, can give no sufficient account of the identity of the 
Catholic faith in all places and in all ages by any of its own 
natural processes or powers. The force of this argument is 
immensely increased when we trace the tradition of the faith 
through the nineteen QEcumenical Councils which, with one 
continuous intelligence, have guarded and unfolded the deposit 
of faith, defining every truth as it has been successively as- 
sailed, in absolute harmony and unity of progression. 

What the Senate is to your great Republic, or the Parlia- 
ment to our English monarchy, such are the nineteen Councils 
of the Church, with this only difference : the secular Legis- 
latures must meet year by year with short recesses ; Councils 
have met on the average once in a century. The reason of 
this is that the mutabilities of national life, which are as the 
water-floods, need constant remedies ; the stability of the 
Church seldom needs new legislation. The faith needs no 
definition except in rare intervals of periodical intellectual dis- 



ROME OR REASON. 19 

order. The discipline of the Church reigns by an universal 
common law which seldom needs a change, and by local laws 
which are provided on the spot. Nevertheless, the legislation 
of the Church, the Corpus Juris, or Canon Law, is a creation 
of wisdom and justice, to which no Statutes at large or Imperial 
pandects can bear comparison. Human intellect has reached 
its climax in jurisprudence, but the world-wide and secular 
legislation of the Church has a higher character. How the 
Christian law corrected, elevated, and completed the Imperial 
law, may be seen in a learned and able work by an American 
author, far from the Catholic faith, but in the main just and 
accurate in his facts and arguments — the Gesta Christi of 
Charles Loring Brace. Water cannot rise above its source, 
and if the Church by mere human wisdom corrected and per- 
fected the Imperial law, its source must be higher than the 
sources of the world. This makes a heavy demand on our 
credulity. 

Starting from St. Peter to Leo XIII., there have been some 
258 Pontiffs claiming to be, and recognized by the whole 
Catholic unity as, successors of St. Peter and Vicars of Jesus 
Christ. To them has been rendered in every age not only the 
external obedience of outward submission, but the internal 
obedience of faith. They have borne the onset of the nations 
who destroyed Imperial Rome, and the tyranny of heretical 
Emperors of Byzantium ; and, worse than this, the alternate 
despotism and patronage of the Emperors of the West, and 
the substraction of obedience in the great Western schisms, 
when the unity of the Church and the authority of its Head 
were, as men thought, gone for ever. It was the last assault — 
the forlorn hope of the gates of hell. Every art of destruction 
had been tried : martyrdom, heresy, secularity, schism ; at 
last, two, and three, and four claimants, or, as the world says, 
rival Popes, were set up, that men might believe that St. Peter 



20 ROME OR REASON. 

had no longer a successor, and our Lord no Vicar, upon 
earth ; for, though all might be illegitimate, only one could 
be the lawful and true Head of the Church. Was it only by 
the human power of man that the unity, external and internal, 
which for fourteen hundred years had been supreme, was once 
more restored in the Council of Constance, never to be broken 
again ? The succession of the English monarchy has been, 
indeed, often broken, and always restored, in these thousand 
years. But here is a monarchy of eighteen hundred years, 
powerless in worldly force or support, claiming and receiving 
not only outward allegiance, but inward unity of intellect and 
will. If any man tell us that these two phenomena are on 
the same level of merely human causes, it is too severe a tax 
upon our natural reason to believe it. 

But the inadequacy of human causes to account for the uni- 
versality, unity, and immutability of the Catholic Church, will 
stand out more visibly if we look at the intellectual and moral 
revolution which Christianity has wrought in the world and 
upon mankind. 

The first effect of Christianity was to fill the world with the 
true knowledge of the One True God, and to destroy utterly 
all idols, not by fire but by light. Before the Light of the 
world no false god and no polytheism could stand. The unity 
and spirituality of God swept away all theogonies and theolo- 
gies of the first four thousand years. The stream of light 
which descended from the beginning expanded into a radiance, 
and the radiance into a flood, which illuminated all nations, as 
it had been foretold, ' ' The earth is filled with the knowledge 
of the Lord, as the covering waters of the sea ;" "And idols 
shall be utterly destroyed."* In this true knowledge of the 
Divine Nature was revealed to men their own relation to a 
Creator as of sons to a father. The Greeks called the chief of 

* Isaias, xi. 9-1 1, 18. 



ROME OR REASON. 21 

the gods Zeus Pater, and the Latins Jupiter ; but neither 
realized the dependence and love of sonship as revealed by 
the Founder of Christianity. 

The monotheism of the world comes down from a primeval 
and Divine source. Polytheism is the corruption of men and 
of nations. Yet in the multiplicity of all polytheisms, one 
supreme Deity was always recognized. The Divine unity was 
imperishable. Polytheism is of human imagination : it is of 
men's manufacture. The deification of nature and passions 
and heroes had filled the world with an elaborate and tenacious 
superstition, surrounded by reverence, fear, religion, and awe. 
Every perversion of what is good in man surrounded it with 
authority ; everything that is evil in man guarded it with 
jealous care. Against this world-wide and imperious demon- 
ology the science of one God, all holy and supreme, advanced 
with resistless force. Beelzebub is not divided against him- 
self; and if polytheism is not Divine, monotheism must be. 
The overthrow of idolatry and demonology was the mastery 
of forces that are above nature. This conclusion is enough for 
our present purpose. 

A second visible effect of Christianity of which nature cannot 
offer any adequate cause is to be found in the domestic life of 
the Christian world. In some nations the existence of marriage 
was not so much as recognized. In others, if recognized, it 
was dishonored by profuse concubinage. Even in Israel, the 
most advanced nation, the law of divorce was permitted for the 
hardness of their hearts. Christianity republished the primitive 
law by which marriage unites only one man and one woman 
indissolubly in a perpetual contract. It raised their mutual 
and perpetual contract to a sacrament. This at one blow con- 
demned all other relations between man and woman, all the 
legal gradations of the Imperial law, and all forms and pleas of 
divorce. Beyond this the spiritual legislation of the Church 



22 ROME OR REASON. 

framed most elaborate tables of consanguinity and affinity, 
prohibiting all marriages between persons in certain degrees 
of kinship or relation. This law has created the purity and 
peace of domestic life. Neither the Greek nor the Roman 
world had any true conception of a home. The 'Earia or Vesta 
was a sacred tradition guarded by vestals like a temple wor- 
ship. It was not a law and a power in the homes of the people. 
Christianity, by enlarging the circles of prohibition within 
which men and women were as brothers and sisters, has created 
the home with all its purities and safeguards. 

Such a law of unity and indissolubility, encompassed by a 
multitude of prohibitions, no mere human legislation could im- 
pose on the the passions and will of mankind. And yet the 
Imperial laws gradually yielded to its resistless pressure, and 
incorporated it in its world-wide legislation. The passions and 
practices of four thousand years were against the change ; yet 
it was accomplished, and it reigns inviolate to this day, though 
the relaxations of schism in the East and the laxities of the 
West have revived the abuse of divorces, and have partially 
abolished the wise and salutary prohibitions which guard the 
homes of the faithful. These relaxations prove that all natural 
forces have been, and are, hostile to the indissoluble law of 
Christian marriage. Certainly, then, it was not by natural 
forces that the Sacrament of Matrimony and the legislation 
springing from it were enacted. If these are restraints of 
human liberty and license, either they do not spring from 
nature, or they have had a supernatural cause whereby they 
exist. It was this that redeemed woman from the traditional 
degradation in which the world had held her. The condition 
of women in Athens and in Rome — which may be taken as 
the highest points of civilization — is too well known to need 
recital. Women had no rights, no property, no independence. 
Plato looked upon them as State property ; Aristotle as 



ROME OR REASON. 23 

chattels ; the Greeks wrote of them as kvvec, yvvaUec, aai tu ukXd. 
ktjj fiara. They were the prey, the sport, the slaves of man. 
Even in Israel, though they were raised incomparably higher 
than in the Gentile world, they were far below the dignity and 
authority of Christian women. Libanius, the friend of Julian, 
the Apostate, said, "Oye gods of Greece, how great are the 
women of the Christians ! ' ' Whence came the elevation of 
womanhood ? Not from the ancient civilization, for it degraded 
them ; not from Israel, for among the Jews the highest state 
of womanhood was the marriage state. The daughter of 
Jepthe went into the mountains to mourn not her death but 
her virginity. The marriage state in the Christian world, 
though holy and good, is not the highest state. The state of 
virginity unto death is the highest condition of man and 
woman. But this is above the law of nature. It belongs to a 
higher order. And this life of virginity, in repression of 
natural passion and lawful instinct, is both above and against 
the tendencies of human nature. It begins in a mortification, 
and ends in a mastery, over the movements and ordinary laws 
of human nature. Who will ascribe this to natural causes ? 
and, if so, why did it not appear in the first four thousand 
years ? And when has it ever appeared except in a handful of 
vestal virgins, or in Oriental recluses, with what reality history 
shows? An exception proves a rule. No one will imagine 
that a life of chastity is impossible to nature ; but the restric- 
tion is a repression of nature which individuals may acquire, 
but the multitude have never attained. A religion which 
imposes chastity on the unmarried, and upon its priesthood, 
and upon the multitudes of women in every age who devote 
themselves to the service of One Whom they have never seen, 
is a mortification of nature in so high a degree as to stand out 
as a fact and a phenomenon, of which mere natural causes 
afford no adequate solution. Its existence, not in a handful 



24 ROME OR REASON. 

out of the millions of the world, but its prevalence and con- 
tinuity in multitudes scattered throughout the Christian world, 
proves the presence of a cause higher than the laws of nature. 
So true is this, that jurists teach that the three vows of chastity, 
poverty, and obedience are contrary to ' l the policy of the 
law," that is, to the interests of the commonwealth, which 
desires the multiplication, enrichment, and liberty of its 
members. 

To what has been said may be added the change wrought 
by Christianity upon the social, political, and international 
relations of the world. The root of this ethical change, private 
and public, is the Christian home. The authority of parents, 
the obedience of children, the love of brotherhood, are the 
three active powers which have raised the society of man 
above the level of the old world. Israel was head and shoulders 
above the world around it ; but Christendom is high above 
Israel. The new Commandment of brotherly love, and the 
Sermon on the Mount, have wrought a revolution, both in 
private and public life. From this come the laws of justice 
and sympathy which bind together the nations of the Christian 
world. In the old world, even the most refined races, wor- 
shiped by our modern philosophers, held and taught that man 
could hold property in man. In its chief cities there were 
more slaves than free men. Who has taught the equality of 
men before the law, and extinguished the impious thought 
that man can hold property in man? It was no philosopher : 
even Aristotle taught that a slave was bpyavov &ov. It was no 
lawgiver, for all taught the lawfulness of slavery till Christian- 
ity denied it. The Christian law has taught that man can 
lawfully sell his labor, but that he cannot lawfully be sold, or 
sell himself. 

The necessity of being brief, the impossibility of drawing out 
the picture of the old world, its profound immoralities, its un- 



ROME OR REASON. 25 

imaginable cruelties, compels me to argue with my right hand 
tied behind me. I can do no more than point again to Mr. 
Brace's " Gesta Christi," or to Dr. Dollinger's " Gentile and 
Jew," as witnesses to the facts which I have stated or implied. 
No one who has not read such books, or mastered their con- 
tents by original study, can judge of the force of the assertion 
that Christianity has reformed the world by direct antagonism 
to the human will, and by a searching and firm repression of 
human passion. It has ascended the stream of human license, 
contra ictum fluminis , by a power mightier than nature, and 
by laws of a higher order than the relaxations of this world. 

Before Christianity came on earth, the civilization of man 
by merely natural force had culminated. It could not rise 
above its source ; all that it could do was done ; and the civil- 
ization in every race and empire had ended in decline and 
corruption. The old civilization was not regenerated. It 
passed away to give place to a new. But the new had a higher 
source, nobler laws and supernatural powers. The highest 
excellence of men and of nations is the civilization of Chris- 
tianity. The human race has ascended into what we call 
Christendom, that is, into the new creation of charity and 
justice among men. Christendom was created by the world- 
wide Church as we see it before our eyes at this day. Philos- 
ophers and statesmen believe it to be the work of their own 
hands : they did not make it ; but they have for three hundred 
years been unmaking it by reformations and revolutions. 
These are destructive forces. They build up nothing. It has 
been well said by Donoso Cortez that " the history of civiliza- 
tion is the history of Christianity, the history of Christianity is 
the history of the Church, the history of the Church is the his- 
tory of the Pontiffs, the greatest statesmen and rulers that 
the world has ever seen." 

Some years ago, a Professor of great literary reputation in 



26 ROME OR REASON. 

England, who was supposed even then to be, as his subsequent 
writings have proved, a skeptic or non-Christian, published a 
well-known and very candid book, under the title of "Ecce 
Homo." The writer placed himself, as it were, outside of 
Christianity. He took, not the Church in the world as in this 
article, but the Christian Scriptures as a historical record, to 
be judged with forensic severity and absolute impartiality of 
mind. To the credit of the author, he fulfilled this pledge ; 
and his conclusion shall here be given. After an examination 
of the life and character of the Author of Christianity, he pro- 
ceeded to estimate His teaching and its effects under the 
following- heads : 



*& 



i. The Christian Legislation. 

2. The Christian Republic. 

3. Its Universality. 

4. The Enthusiasm of Humanity. 

5. The Lord's Supper. 

6. Positive Morality. 

7. Philanthropy. 

8. Edification. 

9. Mercy. 

10. Resentment. 

11. Forgiveness. 

He then draws his conclusion as follows : 

"The achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and 
power a structure so durable and so universal is like no other achieve- 
ment which history records. The masterpieces of the men of action 
are coarse and commonplace in comparison with it, and the master- 
pieces of speculation flimsy and unsubstantial. When we speak of it 
the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether. Shall we speak 
of the originality of the design, of the skill displayed in the execution ? 
All such terms are inadequate. Originality and contriving skill operate 
indeed, but, as it were, implicitly. The creative effort which pro- 
duced that against which it is said the gates of hell shall not prevail 



ROME OR REASON. 2*] 

cannot be analyzed. No architect's designs were furnished for the 
New Jerusalem ; no committee drew up rules for the universal com- 
monwealth. If in the works of nature we can trace the indications of 
calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of precaution, of ingenuity, 
then in Christ's work it may be that the same indications occur. But 
these inferior and secondary powers were not consciously exercised; 
they were implicitly present in the manifold yet single creative act. 
The inconceivable work was done in calmness ; before the eyes of 
men it was noiselessly accomplished, attracting little attention. Who 
can describe that which unites men? Who has entered into the 
formation of speech, which is the symbol of their union? Who can 
describe exhaustively the origin of civil society? He who can do 
these things can explain the origin of the Christian Church. For 
others it must be enough to say. ' The Holy Ghost fell on those that 
believed.' No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the work- 
men crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets ; no 
man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe : ' it descended out of 
heaven from God.' " * 

And yet the writer is, as he was then, still outside of Chris- 
tianity. 

III. We come now to our third point, that Christianity has 
always claimed a Divine origin and a Divine presence as the 
source of its authority and powers. 

To prove this by texts from the New Testament would be to 
transcribe the volume ; and if the evidence of the whole New 
Testament were put in, not only might some men deny its 
weight as evidence, but we should place our whole argument 
upon a false foundation. Christianity was anterior to the New 
Testament and is independent of it. The Christian Scriptures 
presuppose both the faith and the Church as already existing, 
known, and believed. Prior liber quam stylus : as Tertullian 
argued. The Gospel was preached before it was written. The 
four books were written to those who already believed, to 
confirm their faith. They were written at intervals : St. 
Matthew in Hebrew in the year 39, in Greek in 45. St. Mark 
in 43, St. Luke in 57, St. John about 90, in different places 
* " Ecce Homo," Conclusion, p. 329, Fifth Edition. Macmillan, 1886. 



28 ROME OR REASON. 

and for different motives. Four Gospels did not exist for 
sixty years, or two generations of men. St. Peter and St. 
Paul knew of only three of our four. In those sixty years the 
faith had spread from east to west. Saints and Martyrs had 
gone up to their crown who never saw a sacred book. The 
Apostolic Epistles prove the antecedent existence of the 
Churches to which they were addressed. Rome and Corinth, 
and Galatia and Ephesus, Philippi and Colossae, were Churches 
with pastors and people before St. Paul wrote to them. The 
Church had already attested and executed its Divine legation 
before the New Testament existed ; and when all its books 
were written they were not as yet collected into a volume. 
The earliest collection was about the beginning of the second 
century, and in the custody of the Church in Rome. We 
must, therefore, seek to know what was and is Christianity 
before and outside ot the written books ; and we have the 
same evidence for the oral tradition of the faith as we have for 
the New Testament itself. Both alike were in the custody of 
the Church ; both are delivered to us by the same witness and 
on the same evidence. To reject either, is logically to reject 
both. Happily men are not saved by logic, but by faith. 
The millions of men in all ages have believed by inheritance 
of truth divinely guarded and delivered to them. They have 
no need of logical analysis. They have believed from their 
childhood. Neither children nor those who infantibus cequi- 
parantur are logicians. It is the penance of the doubter and 
the unbeliever to regain by toil his lost inheritance. It is a 
hard penance, like the suffering of those who eternally debate 
on "predestination, freewill, fate." 

Between the death of St. John and the mature lifetime of 
St. Irenaeus fifty years elapsed. St. Polycarp was disciple of 
St. John. St. Irenaeus was disciple of St. Polycarp. The 
mind of St. John and the mind of St. Irenaeus had only one 



ROME OR REASON. 29 

intermediate intelligence, in contact with each. It would be 
an affectation of minute criticism to treat the doctrine of St. 
Irenaeus as a departure from the doctrine of St. Polycarp, or 
the doctrine of St. Polycarp as a departure from the doctrine 
of St. John. Moreover, St. John ruled the Church atEphesus, 
and St. Irenaeus was born in Asia Minor about the year a. d. 
120 — that is, twenty years after St. John's death, when the 
Church in Asia Minor was still full of the light of his teaching 
and of the accents of his voice. Let us see how St. Irenaeus de- 
scribes the faith and the Church. In his work against Heresies, 
in Book iii. chap, i., he says, "We have known the way of 
our salvation by those through whom the Gospel came to us ; 
which, indeed, they then preached, but afterwards, by the will 
of God, delivered to us in Scriptures, the future foundation 
and pillar of our faith. It is not lawful to say that they 
preached before they had perfect knowledge, as some dare to 
affirm, boasting themselves to be correctors of the Apostles. 
For after our Lord rose from the dead, and when they had 
been clothed with the power of the Holy Ghost, Who came 
upon them from on high, they were filled with all truths, and 
had knowledge which was perfect." In chapter ii. he adds 
that, "When they are refuted out of Scripture, they turn and 
accuse the Scriptures as erroneous, unauthoritative, and of 
various readings, so that the truth cannot be found by those 
who do not know tradition " — that is, their own. " But when 
we challenge them to come to the tradition of the Apostles, 
which is in custody of the succession of Presbyters in the 
Church, they turn against tradition, saying that they are not 
only wiser than the Presbyters, but even the Apostles, and 
have found the truth." " It therefore comes to pass that they 
will not agree either with the Scriptures or with tradition." 
(Ibid. c. iii.) "Therefore, all who desire to know the truth 
ought to look to the tradition of the Apostles, which is mani- 



30 ROME OR REASON. 

fest in all the world and in all the Church. We are able to 
count up the Bishops who were instituted in the Church by 
the Apostles, and their successors to our day. They never 
taught nor knew such things as these men madly assert." 
"But as it would be too long in such a book as this to enu- 
merate the successions of all the Churches, we point to the 
tradition of the greatest, most ancient Church, known to all, 
founded and constituted in Rome by the two glorious Apostles 
Peter and Paul, and to the faith announced to all men, coming 
down to us by the succession of Bishops, thereby confounding 
all those who, in any way, by self-pleasing, or vainglory, or 
blindness, or an evil mind, teach as they ought not.. For 
with this Church, by reason oLits greater principality, it is 
necessary that all churches should agree ; that is, the faithful, 
wheresoever they be, for in that Church the tradition of the 
Apostles has been preserved." No comment need be made 
on the words the " greater principality," which have been 
perverted by every anti-Catholic writer from the time they 
were written to this day. But if any one will compare them 
with the words of St. Paul to the Colossians (chap. i. 18), 
describing the primacy of the Head of the Church in heaven, 
it will appear almost certain that the original Greek of St. 
Irenaeus, which is unfortunately lost, contained either rd TrpuTEia, 
or some inflection of ttputev u which signifies primacy. How- 
ever this may be, St. Irenaeus goes on: "The blessed 
Apostles, having founded and instructed the Church, gave in 
charge the Episcopate, for the administration of the same, to 
Linus. Of this Linus, Paul, in his Epistle to Timothy, makes 
mention. To him succeeded Anacletus, and after him, in the 
third place from the Apostles, Clement received the Episcopate, 
he who saw the Apostles themselves and conferred with them, 
while as yet he had the preaching of the Apostles in his ears 
and the tradition before his eyes ; and not he only, but many 



ROME OR REASON. 31 

who had been taught by the Apostles still survived. In the 
time of this Clement, when no little dissension had arisen 
among the brethren in Corinth, the Church in Rome wrote 
very powerful letters potentissimas litteras to the Corinthians, 
recalling them to peace, restoring their faith, and declaring 
the tradition which it had so short a time ago received from 
the Apostles." These letters of St. Clement are well known, 
but have lately become more valuable and complete by the 
discovery of fragments published in a new edition by Light- 
foot. In these fragments there is a tone of authority fully 
explaining the words of St. Irenaeus. He then traces the 
succession of the Bishops of Rome to his own day, and adds : 
"This demonstration is complete to show that it is one and 
the same life-giving faith which has been preserved in the 
Church from the Apostles until now, and is handed on in 
truth." " Polycarp was not only taught by the Apostles, and 
conversed with many of those who had seen our Lord, but he 
also was constituted by the Apostles in Asia to be Bishop in 
the Church of Smyrna. We also saw him in our early youth, 
for he lived long, and when very old departed from this life 
most gloriously and nobly by martyrdom. He ever taught 
that what he had learned from the Apostles, and what the 
Church had delivered, those things only are true." In the 
fourth chapter, St. Irenaeus goes on to say: "Since, then, 
there are such proofs (of the faith), the truth is no longer to be 
sought for among others, which it is easy to receive from the 
Church, forasmuch as the Apostles laid up all truth in fullness 
in a rich depository, that all who will may receive from it the 
water of life." " But what if the Apostles had not left us the 
Scriptures : ought we not to follow the order of tradition, 
which they gave in charge to them to whom they intrusted 
the Churches ? To which order (of tradition) many barbarous 
nations yield assent, who believe in Christ without paper and 



32 ROME OR REASON. 

ink, having salvation written by the Spirit in their hearts, and 
diligently holding the ancient tradition." In the twenty-sixth 
chapter of the same book he says : " Therefore, it is our duty 
to obey the Presbyters who are in the Church, who have suc- 
cession from the Apostles, as we have already shown ; who 
also with the succession of the Episcopate have the charisma 
veritatis cerium" the spiritual and certain gift of truth. 

I have quoted these passages at length, not so much as 
proofs of the Catholic Faith as to show the identity of the 
Church at its outset with the Church before our eyes at this 
hour, proving that the acorn has grown up into its oak, or, if 
you will, the identity of the Church at this hour with the 
Church of the Apostolic mission. These passages show the 
Episcopate, its central principality, its succession, its custody 
of the faith, its subsequent reception and guardianship of the 
Scriptures, its Divine tradition, and the cha?'isma or Divine 
assistance by which its perpetuity is secured in the succession 
of the Apostles. This is almost verbally, after eighteen hund- 
red years, the decree of the Vatican Council : Veritatis etfidei 
nunquam deficientis charisma.* 

But St. Irenaeus draws out in full the Church of this day. 
He shows the parallel of the first creation and of the second ; 
of the first Adam and the Second ; and of the analogy between 
the Incarnation or natural body, and the Church or mystical 
body of Christ. He says : 

Our faith " we received from the Church, and guard .... 
as an excellent gift in a noble vessel, always full of youth, and 
making youthful the vessel itself in which it is. For this gift 
of God is intrusted to the Church, as the breath of life {was 
imparted') to the first man, so this end, that all the members 
partaking of it might be quickened with life. And thus the 
communication of Christ is imparted ; that is, the Holy Ghost, 
* " Const. Dogmatica Prima de Ecclesia Christi," cap. iv. 



ROME OR REASON. 33 

the earnest of incorruption, the confirmation of the faith, the 
way of ascent to God. For in the Church (St. Paul says) God 
placed Apostles, Prophets, Doctors, and all other operations 
of the Spirit, of which none are partakers who do not come to 
the Church, thereby depriving themselves of life by a perverse 
mind and worse deeds. For where the Church is, there is 
also the Spirit of God ; and where the Spirit of God is, there 
is the Church, and all grace. But the Spirit is truth. Where- 
fore, they who do not partake of Him (the Spirit) , and are not 
nurtured unto life at the breast of the mother (the Church), do 
not receive of that most pure fountain which proceeds from 
the Body of Christ, but dig out for themselves broken pools 
from the trenches of the earth, and drink water soiled with 
mire, because they turn aside from the faith of the Church lest 
they should be convicted, and reject the Spirit lest they should 
be taught." * Again he says : 

"The Church, scattered throughout the world, even unto 
the ends of the earth, received from the Apostles and their 
disciples the faith in one God the Father Almighty, that made 
the heaven and the earth, and the seas, and all things that are 
in them." &c.f 

He then recites the doctrines of the Holy Trinity, the In- 
carnation, the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, and His coming again to raise all men, to 
judge men and angels, and to give sentence of condemnation 
or of life everlasting. How much soever the language may 
vary from other forms, such is the substance of the Baptismal 
Creed. He then adds : 

14 The Church having received this preaching and this faith, 
as we have said before, although it be scattered abroad through 
the whole world, carefully preserves it, dwelling as in one 
habitation, and believes alike in these (doctrines) as though 

*St. Irenaeus, Cont. Hczret., lib. iii. cap. xxiv. fLib. i. cap. x. 



34 ROME OR REASON. 

she had one soul and the same heart : and in strict accord, as 
though she had one mouth, proclaims, and teaches, and de- 
livers onward these things. And although there may be many 
diverse languages in the world, yet the power of the tradition 
is one and the same. And neither do the Churches planted in 
Germany believe otherwise, or otherwise deliver (the faith), 
nor those in Iberia, nor among the Celtae, nor in the East, nor 
in Egypt, nor in Libya, nor they that are planted in the main- 
land. But as the sun, which is God's creature, in all the 
world is one and the same, so also the preaching of the truth 
shineth everywhere, and lightened all men that are willing to 
come to the knowledge of the truth. And neither will any 
ruler of the Church, though he be mighty in the utterance of 
truth, teach otherwise than thus (for no man is above the 
master), nor will he that is weak in the same diminish from 
the tradition ; for the faith being one and the same, he that is 
able to say most of it hath nothing over, and he that is able to 
say least hath no lack. ' ' * 

To St. Irenaeus, then, the Church was "the irrefragable 
witness of its own legation." When did it cease so to be ? It 
would be easy to multiply quotations from Tertullian in A. D. 
200, from St. Cyprian A. D. 250, from St. Augustine and St 
Optatus in A. d. 350, from St. Leo in A. d. 450, all of which 
are on the same traditional lines of faith in a divine mission to 
the world and of a divine assistance in its discharge. But I 
refrain from doing so because I should have to write not an 
article but a folio. Any Catholic theology will give the pas- 
sages which are now before me ; or one such book as the Loci 
Theologici of Melchior Canus will suffice to show the continuity 
and identity of the tradition of St. Irenaeus and the tradition of 
the Vatican Council, in which the universal church last de- 
clared the immutable faith and its own legation to mankind. 
*St. Irenaeus, lib. i. c. x. 



ROME OR REASON. 35 

The world-wide testimony of the Catholic Church is a suffi- 
cient witness to prove the coming of the Incarnate Son to 
redeem mankind, and to return to His Father ; it is also 
sufficient to prove the advent of the Holy Ghost to abide with 
us for ever. The work of the Son in this world was accom- 
plished by the Divine acts and facts of His three-and-thirty 
years of life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension. The office 
of the Holy Ghost is perpetual, not only as the Illuminator 
and Sanctifier of all who believe, but also as the Life and Guide 
of the Church. I may quote now the words of the Founder 
of the Church : "It is expedient to you that I go : for if I go 
not, the Paraclete will not come to you ; but if I go, I will 
send Him to you." * " I will ask the Father, and He shall 
give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for 
ever."f "The Spirit of Truth, Whom the world cannot re- 
ceive, because it seeth Him not nor knoweth Him ; but you 
shall know Him, because He shall abide with you and shall be in 
you." X St. Paul in the Epistles to the Ephesians describes 
the Church as a body of which the Head is in heaven, and the 
Author of its indefectible life abiding in it as His temple. 
Therefore the words, "He that heareth you heareth Me." 
This could not be if the witness of the Apostles had been only 
human. A Divine guidance was attached to the office they 
bore. They were, therefore, also judges of right and wrong, 
and teachers by Divine guidance of the truth. But the pres- 
ence and guidance of the Spirit of Truth is as full at this day 
as when St. Irenaeus wrote. As the Churches then were 
witnesses, judges, and teachers, so is the Church at this hour 
a world-wide witness, an unerring judge and teacher, divinely 
guided and guarded in the truth. It is therefore not only a 

*St. John, xvi. 7. 

t Ibid, xiv. 16. 

% St. John, xiv. 16, 17. 



36 ROME OR REASON. 

human and historical, but a Divine witness. This is the chief 
Divine truth which the last three hundred years have obscured. 
Modern Christianity believes in the one advent of the Re- 
deemer, but rejects the full and personal advent of the Holy 
Ghost. And yet the same evidence proves both. The Chris- 
tianity of reformers always returns to Judaism, because they 
reject the full, or do not believe the personal, advent of the 
Holy Ghost. They deny that there is an infallible teacher, 
among men ; and therefore they return to the types and 
shadows of the Law before the Incarnation, when the Head 
was not yet incarnate, and the Body of Christ did not as yet 
exist. 

But perhaps some one will say, ' ' I admit your description of 
the Church as it is now and as it was in the days of St. Irenseus ; 
but the eighteen hundred years of which you have said nothing 
were ages of declension, disorder, superstition, demoraliza- 
tion." I will answer by a question: was not this foretold ? 
Was not the Church to be a field of wheat and tares growing 
together till the harvest at the end of the world ? There were 
Cathari of old, and Puritans since, impatient at the patience of 
God in bearing with the perversities and corruptions of the 
human intellect and will. The Church, like its Head in heaven, 
is both human and divine. "He was crucified in weakness," 
but no power of man could wound His divine nature. So 
with the Church, which is His Body. Its human element 
may corrupt and die ; its divine life, sanctity, authority, and 
structure cannot die ; nor can the errors of human intellect 
fasten upon its faith, nor the immoralities of the human will 
fasten upon its sanctity. Its organization of Head and Body 
is of divine creation, divinely guarded by the Holy Ghost, 
who quickens it by His indwelling, and guides it by His light. 
It is in itself incorrupt and incorruptible in the midst of cor- 
ruption, as the light of heaven falls upon all the decay and 



ROME OR REASON. 37 

corruption in the world, unsullied and unalterably pure. We 
are never concerned to deny or to cloak the sins of Christians 
or of Catholics. They may destroy themselves, but they can- 
not infect the Church from which they fall. The fall of Lucifer 
left no stain behind him. 

When men accuse the Church of corruption, they reveal the 
fact that to them the Church is a human institution, of volun- 
tary aggregation or of legislative enactment. They reveal the 
fact that to them the Church is not an object of Divine faith, 
as the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar. They do 
not perceive or will not believe that the articles of the Baptismal 
Creed are objects of faith, divinely revealed or divinely created. 
11 I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the 
Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins," are all objects 
of faith in a Divine order. They are present in human history, 
but the human element which envelops them has no power to 
infect or to fasten upon them. Until this is perceived there 
can be no true or full belief in the advent and office of the 
Holy Ghost, or in the nature and sacramental action of the 
Church. It is the visible means and pledge of light and of 
sanctification to all who do not bar their intellect and their will 
against its inward and spiritual grace. The Church is not on 
probation. It is the instrument of probation to the world. 
As the light of the world, it is changeless as the firmament. 
As the source of sanctification, it is inexhaustible as the River 
of Life. The human and external history of men calling them- 
selves Christian and Catholic has been at times as degrading 
and abominable as any adversary is pleased to say. But the 
sanctity of the Church is no more affected by human sins than 
was Baptism by the hypocrisy of Simon Magus. The Divine 
foundation, and office, and mission of the Church is a part of 
Christianity. They who deny it deny an article of faith ; they 
who believe it imperfectly are the followers of a fragmentary 



38 ROME OR REASON. 

Christianity of modern date. Who can be a disciple of Jesus 
Christ who does not believe the words? " On this rock I will 
build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against 
it;" "As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you;"* "I 
dispose to you, as My Father hath disposed to Me, a king- 
dom ;"f "All power in heaven and earth is given unto Me. 
Go, therefore, and teach all nations ; " J " He that heareth you 
heareth Me;"§ "I will be with you always, even unto the 
end of the world ;"|| "When the days of Pentecost were 
accomplished they were all together in one place : and sud- 
denly there came a sound from heaven as of a mighty wind 
coming, and there appeared to them parted tongues, as it were, 
of fire ;" "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost ;" ** 
"It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us to lay upon 
you no other burdens. "ff But who denies that the Apostles 
claimed a Divine mission ? and who can deny that the Cath- 
olic and Roman Church from St. Irenaeus to Leo XIII. has 
ever and openly claimed the same, invoking in all its supreme 
acts as witness, teacher, and legislator the presence, light, and 
guidance of the Holy Ghost ? As the preservation of all 
created things is by the same creative power produced in 
perpetual and universal action, so the indefectibility of the 
Church and of the faith is by the perpetuity of the presence 
and office of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. Therefore, 
St. Augustine calls the day of Pentecost, Natalis Spiritus 
Sancti. 

It is more than time that I should make an end ; and to do 
so it will be well to sum up the heads of our argument. The 

* St. John, xx. 21. 

f St. Luke, xxii. 29. 

% St. Matthew, xxviii. 18, 19. 

\ St. Luke, x. 10. 

|| St. Matthew, xxviii. 20. 

**Acts, ii. 1-5. 

tt Acts, xv. 28. 



ROME OR REASON. 39 

Vatican Council declares that the world-wide Church is the 
irrefragable witness of its own legation or mission to mankind. 

In proof of this I have affirmed : 

i. That the imperishable existence of Christianity, and the 
vast and undeniable revolution that it has wrought in men and 
in nations, in the moral elevation of manhood and of woman- 
hood, and in the domestic, social and political life of the 
Christian world, cannot be accounted for by any natural causes, 
or by any forces that are, as philosophers say, intra possibilita- 
tem natures, within the limits of what is possible to man. 

2. That this world-wide and permanent elevation of the 
Christian world, in comparison with both the old world and 
the modern world outside of Christianity, demands a cause 
higher than the possibility of nature. 

3. That the Church has always claimed a Divine origin and 
a Divine office and authority in virtue of a perpetual Divine 
assistance. To this even the Christian world, in all its frag- 
ments external to the Catholic unity, bears witness. It is 
turned to our reproach. They rebuke us for holding the 
teaching of the Church to be infallible. We take the rebuke 
as a testimony of our changeless faith. It is not enough for 
men to say that they refuse to believe this account of the 
visible and palpable fact of the imperishable Christianity of the 
Catholic and Roman Church. They must find a more reason- 
able, credible, and adequate account for it. This no man has 
yet done. The denials are many and the solutions are many ; 
but they do not agree together. Their multiplicity is proof of 
their human origin. The claim of the Catholic Church to a 
Divine authority and to a Divine assistance is one and the same 
in every age, and is identical in every place. Error is not the 
principle of unity, nor truth of variations. 

The Church has guarded the doctrine of the Apostles, by 
Divine assistance, with unerring fidelity. The articles of the 



40 ROME OR REASON. 

faith are to-day the same in number as in the beginning. The 
explicit definition of their implicit meaning has expanded from 
age to age, as the everchanging denials and perversions of the 
world have demanded new definitions of the ancient truth. 
The world is against all dogma, because it is impatient of 
definiteness and certainty in faith. It loves open questions 
and the liberty of error. The Church is dogmatic for fear of 
error. Every truth defined adds to its treasure. It narrows 
the field of error and enlarges the inheritance of truth. The 
world and the Church are ever moving in opposite directions. 
As the world becomes more vague and uncertain, the Church 
becomes more definite. It moves against wind and tide, 
against the stress and storm of the world. There was never a 
more luminous evidence of this supernatural fact than in the 
Vatican Council. For eight months all that the world could 
say and do, like the four winds of heaven, was directed upon 
it. Governments, statesmen, diplomatists, philosophers, in- 
triguers, mockers, and traitors did their utmost and their worst 
against it. They were in dread lest the Church should declare 
that by Divine assistance its Head in faith and morals cannot 
err ; for if this be true, man did not found it, man cannot 
reform it, man cannot teach it to interpret its history or its 
acts. It knows its own history, and is the supreme witness of 
its own legation. 

I am well aware that I have been writing truisms, and re- 
peating trite and trivial arguments. They are trite because 
the feet of the faithful for nearly nineteen hundred years have 
worn them in their daily life ; they are trivial because they 
point to the one path in which the wayfarer, though a fool, 

shall not err. 

Henry Edward, (Cardinal Manning), 

Card. Archbishop of Westminster. 



ROME OR REASON? 



A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING. 



Superstition "has ears more deaf than adders to the voice of 
a?iy true decision. ' ' 

PART I. 

CARDINAL MANNING has stated the claims of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church with great clearness and appar- 
ently without reserve. The age, position and learning of this 
man give a certain weight to his words, apart from their 
worth. He represents the oldest of the Christian churches. 
The questions involved are among the most important that 
can engage the human mind. No one having the slightest 
regard for that superb thing known as intellectual honesty, 
will avoid the issues tendered, or seek in any way to gain a 
victory over truth. 

Without candor, discussion, in the highest sense, is impos- 
sible. All have the same interest, whether they know it or 
not, in the establishment of facts. All have the same to gain, 
the same to lose. He loads the dice against himself who scores 
a point against the right. 

Absolute honesty is to the intellectual perception what light 

is to the eyes. Prejudice and passion cloud the mind. In 

each disputant should be blended the advocate and judge. 

In this spirit, having in view only the ascertainment of the 

(41) 



42 ROME OR REASON. 

truth, let us examine the arguments, or rather the statements 
and conclusions, of Cardinal Manning. 

The proposition is that "The Church itself, by its marvelous 
propagation, its eminent sanctity, its inexhaustible fruitfulness 
in all good things, its catholic unity and invincible stability, is 
a vast and perpetual motive of credibility, and an irrefragable 
witness of its own divine legation." 

The reasons given as supporting this proposition are : 

That the Catholic Church interpenetrates all the nations of 
the civilized world ; that it is extranational and independent 
in a supernational unity ; that it is the same in every place ; 
that it speaks all languages in the civilized world ; that it is 
obedient to one head ; that as many as seven hundred bishops 
have knelt before the pope ; that pilgrims from all nations have 
brought gifts to Rome, and that all these things set forth in the 
most self-evident way the unity and universality of the Roman 
Church. 

It is also asserted that "men see the Head of the Church 
year by year speaking to the nations of the world, treating 
with Empires, Republics and Governments ;" that "there is 
no other man on earth that can so bear himself," and that 
' ' neither from Canterbury nor from Constantinople can such a 
voice go forth to which rulers and people listen." 

It is also claimed that the Catholic Church has enlightened 
and purified the world ; that it has given us the peace and 
purity of domestic life ; that it has destroyed idolatry and 
demonology ; that it gave us a body of law from a higher 
source than man ; that it has produced the civilization of 
Christendom ; that the popes were the greatest of statesmen and 
rulers ; that celibacy is better than marriage, and that the 
revolutions and reformations of the last three hundred years 
have been destructive and calamitous. 

We will examine these assertions as well as some others. 



ROME OR REASON. 43 

No one will dispute that the Catholic Church is the best 
witness of its own existence. The same is true of every thing 
that exists — of every church, great and small, of every man, 
and of every insect. 

But it is contended that the marvelous growth or propaga- 
tion of the Church is evidence of its divine origin. Can it be 
said that success is supernatural ? All success in this world is 
relative. Majorities are not necessarily right. If anything is 
known — if anything can be known — we are sure that very 
large bodies of men have frequently been wrong. We believe 
in what is called the progress of mankind. Progress, for the 
most part, consists in finding new truths and getting rid of old 
errors — that is to say, getting nearer and nearer in harmony 
with the facts of nature, seeing with greater clearness the con- 
ditions of well-being. 

There is no nation in which a majority leads the way. In 
the progress of mankind, the few have been the nearest right. 
There have been centuries in which the light seemed to 
emanate only from a handful of men, while the rest of the 
world was enveloped in darkness. Some great man leads the 
way — he becomes the morning star, the prophet of a coming- 
day. Afterwards, many millions accept his views. But there 
are still heights above and beyond ; there are other pioneers, 
and the old day, in comparison with the new, becomes a 
night. So, we cannot say that success demonstrates either 
divine origin or supernatural aid. 

We know, if we know anything, that wisdom has often 
been trampled beneath the feet of the multitude. We know 
that the torch of science has been blown out by the breath of 
the hydra-headed. We know that the whole intellectual 
heaven has been darkened again and again. The truth or 
falsity of a proposition cannot be determined by ascertaining 
the number of those who assert, or of those who deny. 



44 ROME OR REASON. 

If the marvelous propagation of the Catholic Church proves 
its divine origin, what shall we say of the marvelous propaga- 
tion of Mohammedanism? 

Nothing can be clearer than that Christianity arose out of 
the ruins of the Roman Empire — that is to say, the ruins of 
Paganism. And it is equally clear that Mohammedanism 
arose out of the wreck and ruin of Catholicism. 

After Mohammed came upon the stage, "Christianity was 
forever expelled from its most glorious seats — from Palestine, 
the scene of its most sacred recollections ; from Asia Minor, 
that of its first churches ; from Egypt, whence issued the great 
doctrine of Trinitarian Orthodoxy, and from Carthage, who 
imposed her belief on Europe." Before that time "the 
ecclesiastical chiefs of Rome, of Constantinople, and of Alex- 
andria were engaged in a desperate struggle for supremacy 
carrying out their purposes by weapons and in ways revolting 
to the conscience of man. Bishops were concerned in assas- 
sinations, poisonings, adulteries, Windings, riots, treasons, 
civil war. Patriarchs and primates were excommunicating and 
anathematizing one another in their rivalries for earthly 
power — bribing eunuchs with gold and courtesans and royal 
females with concessions of episcopal love. Among legions 
of monks who carried terror into the imperial armies and riot 
into the great cities arose hideous clamors for theological 
dogmas, but never a voice for intellectual liberty or the out- 
raged rights of man. 

"Under these circumstances, amid these atrocities and 
crimes, Mohammed arose, and raised his own nation from 
Fetichism, the adoration of the meteoric stone, and from the 
basest idol worship, and irrevocably wrenched from Christianity 
more than half — and that by far the best half — of her posses- 
sions, since it included the Holy Land, the birth-place of the 
Christian faith, and Africa, which had imparted to it its Latin 



ROME OR REASON. 45 

form ; and now, after a lapse of more than a thousand years 
that continent, and a very large part of Asia, remain perma- 
nently attached to the Arabian doctrine." 

It may be interesting in this connection to say that the 
Mohammedan now proves the divine mission of his Apostle by 
appealing to the marvelous propagation of the faith. If the 
argument is good in the mouth of a Catholic, is it not good 
in the mouth of a Moslem ? Let us see if it is not better. 

According to Cardinal Manning, the Catholic Church tri- 
umphed only over the institutions of men — triumphed only 
over religions that had been established by men, — by wicked 
and ignorant men. But Mohammed triumphed not only over 
the religions of men, but over the religion of God. This 
ignorant driver of camels, this poor, unknown, unlettered boy, 
unassisted by God, unenlightened by supernatural means, 
drove the armies of the true cross before him as the winter's 
storm drives withered leaves. At his name, priests, bishops, 
and cardinals fled with white faces — popes trembled, and the 
armies of God, fighting for the true faith, were conquered on 
a thousand fields. 

If the success of a church proves its divinity, and after that 
another Church arises and defeats the first, what does that 
prove? 

Let us put this question in a milder form : Suppose the 
second church lives and flourishes in spite of the first, what 
does that prove ? 

As a matter of fact, however, no church rises with every- 
thing against it. Something is favorable to it, or it could not 
exist. If it succeeds and grows, it is absolutely certain that 
the conditions are favorable. If it spreads rapidly, it simply 
shows that the conditions are exceedingly favorable, and that 
the forces in opposition are weak and easily overcome. 

Here, in my own country, within a few years, has arisen a 



46 ROME OR REASON. 

new religion. Its foundations were laid in an intelligent com- 
munity, having had the advantages of what is known as modern 
civilization. Yet this new faith — founded on the grossest 
absurdities, as gross as we find in the Scriptures — in spite of 
all opposition began to grow, and kept growing. It was sub- 
jected to persecution, and the persecution increased its strength. 
It was driven from State to State by the believers in universal 
love, until it left what was called civilization, crossed the wide 
plains, and took up its abode on the shores of the Great Salt 
Lake. It continued to grow. Its founder, as he declared, 
had frequent conversations with God, and received directions 
from that source. Hundreds of miracles were performed — 
multitudes upon the desert were miraculously fed — the sick 
were cured — the dead were raised, and the Mormon Church 
continued to grow, until now, less than half a century after 
the death of its founder, there are several hundred thousand 
believers in the new faith. 

Do you think that men enough could join this church to 
prove the truth of its creed ? 

Joseph Smith said that he found certain golden plates that 
had been buried for many generations, and upon these plates, 
in some unknown language, had been engraved this new 
revelation, and I think he insisted that by the use of miracu- 
lous mirrors this language was translated. If there should be 
Mormon bishops in all the countries of the world, eighteen 
hundred years from now, do you think a cardinal of that faith 
could prove the truth of the golden plates simply by the fact 
that the faith had spread and that seven hundred bishops had 
knelt before the head of that church ? 

It seems to me that a " supernatural " religion — that is to 
say, a religion that is claimed to have been divinely founded 
and to be authenticated by miracles, is much easier to establish 
among an ignorant people than any other — and the more 



ROME OR REASON. 47 

ignorant the people, the easier such a religion could be 
established. The reason for this is plain. All ignorant tribes, 
all savage men, believe in the miraculous, in the supernatural. 
The conception of uniformity, of what may be called the 
eternal consistency of nature, is an idea far above their com- 
prehension. They are forced to think in accordance with their 
minds, and as a consequence they account for all phenomena 
by the acts of superior beings — that is to say, by the super- 
natural. In other words, that religion having most in com- 
mon with the savage, having most that was satisfactory to his 
mind, or to his lack of mind, would stand the best chance of 
success. 

It is probably safe to say that at one time, or during one 
phase of the development of man, everything was miraculous. 
After a time, the mind slowly developing, certain phenomena, 
always happening under like conditions, were called "natural," 
and none suspected any special interference. The domain of 
the miraculous grew less and less — the domain of the natural 
larger ; that is to say, the common became the natural, but 
the uncommon was still regarded as the miraculous. The 
rising and setting of the sun ceased to excite the wonder of 
mankind — there was no miracle about that ; but an eclipse of 
the sun was miraculous. Men did not then know that eclipses 
are periodical, that they happen with the same certainty that 
the sun rises. It took many observations through many 
generations to arrive at this conclusion. Ordinary rains be- 
came "natural," floods remained "miraculous." 

But it can all be summed up in this : The average man re- 
gards the common as natural, the uncommon as supernatural. 
The educated man — and by that I mean the developed man — 
is satisfied that all phenomena are natural, and that the super- 
natural does not and can not exist. 

As a rule, an individual is egotistic in the proportion that 



48 ROME OR REASON. 

he lacks intelligence. The same is true of nations and races. 
The barbarian is egotistic enough to suppose that an Infinite 
Being is constantly doing something, or failing to do some- 
thing, on his account. But as man rises in the scale of civil- 
ization, as he becomes really great, he comes to the conclusion 
that nothing in Nature happens on his account — that he is 
hardly great enough to disturb the motions of the planets. 

Let us make an application of this : To me, the success of 
Mormonism is no evidence of its truth, because it has suc- 
ceeded only with the superstitious. It has been recruited from 
communities brutalized by other forms of superstition. To 
me, the success of Mohammed does not tend to show that he 
was right — for the reason that he triumphed only over the 
ignorant, over the superstitious. The same is true of the 
Catholic Church. Its seeds were planted in darkness. It was 
accepted by the credulous, by men incapable of reasoning 
upon such questions. It did not, it has not, it can not triumph 
over the intellectual world. To count its many millions does 
not tend to prove the truth of its creed. On the contrary, 
a creed that delights the credulous gives evidence against 
itself. 

Questions of fact or philosophy cannot be settled simply by 
numbers. There was a time when the Copernican system ol 
astronomy had but few supporters — the multitude being on 
the other side. There was a time when the rotation of the 
earth was not believed by the majority. 

Let us press this idea further. There was a time when 
Christianity was not in the majority, anywhere. Let us 
suppose that the first Christian missionary had met a prelate 
of the Pagan faith, and suppose this prelate had used against 
the Christian missionary the Cardinal's argument — how could 
the missionary have answered if the Cardinal's argument is 
good? 



ROME OR REASON. 49 

But, after all, is the success of the Catholic Church a marvel? 
If this Church is of Divine origin, if it has been under the 
especial care, protection and guidance of an Infinite Being, is 
not its failure far more wonderful than its success? For 
eighteen centuries it has persecuted and preached, and the 
salvation of the world is still remote. This is the result, and 
it may be asked whether it is worth while to try to convert the 
world to Catholicism. 

Are Catholics better than Protestants ? Are they nearer 
honest, nearer just, more charitable ? Are Catholic nations 
better than Protestant ? Do the Catholic nations move in the 
van of progress? Within their jurisdiction are life, liberty and 
property safer than anywhere else ? Is Spain the first nation 
of the world ? 

Let me ask another question : Are Catholics or Protestants 
better than Freethinkers? Has the Catholic Church produced 
a greater man than Humboldt? Has the Protestant produced 
a greater than Darwin? Was not Emerson, so far as purity 
of life is concerned, the equal of any true believer? Was 
Pius IX., or any other Vicar of Christ, superior to Abraham 
Lincoln ? 

But it is claimed that the Catholic Church is universal, and 
that its universality demonstrates its divine origin. 

According to the bible, the Apostles were ordered to go into 
all the world and preach the gospel — yet not one of them, nor 
one of their converts at any time, nor one of the Vicars of God, 
for fifteen hundred years afterward, knew of the existence of 
the Western Hemisphere. During all that time, can it be 
said that the Catholic Church was universal ? At the close of 
the fifteenth century, there was one-half of the world in which 
the Catholic faith had never been preached, and in the other 
half not one person in ten had ever heard of it, and of those 
who had heard of it, not one in ten believed it. Certainly the 
Catholic Church was not then universal 



50 ROME OR REASON. 

Is it universal now? What impression has Catholicism 
made upon the many millions of China, of Japan, of India, of 
Africa ? Can it truthfully be said that the Catholic Church is 
now universal ? When any church becomes universal, it will 
be the only church. There cannot be two universal churches, 
neither can there be one universal church and any other. 

The Cardinal next tries to prove that the Catholic Church 
is divine, "by its eminent sanctity and its inexhaustible fruit- 
fulness in all good things." 

And here let me admit that there are many millions of good 
Catholics — that is, of good men and women who are Catholics. 
It is unnecessary to charge universal dishonesty or hypocrisy, 
for the reason that this would be only a kind of personality. 
Many thousands of heroes have died in defense of the faith, and 
millions of Catholics have killed and been killed for the sake 
of their religion. 

And here it may be well enough to say that martyrdom 
does not even tend to prove the truth of a religion. The 
man who dies in flames, standing by what he believes to be 
true, establishes, not the truth of what he believes, but his 
sincerity. 

Without calling in question the intentions of the Catholic 
Church, we can ascertain whether it has been lt inexhaustibly 
fruitful in all good things," and whether it has been " eminent 
for its sanctity." 

In the first place, nothing can be better than goodness. 
Nothing is more sacred, or can be more sacred, than the well- 
being of man. All things that tend to increase or preserve 
the happiness of the human race are good — that is to say, they 
are sacred. All things that tend to the destruction of man's 
well-being, that tend to his unhappiness, are bad, no matter by 
whom they are taught or done. 

It is perfectly certain that the Catholic Church has taught, 



ROME OR REASON. 5 1 

and still teaches, that intellectual liberty is dangerous — that it 
should not be allowed. It was driven to take this position 
because it had taken another. It taught, and still teaches, that 
a certain belief is necessary to salvation. It has always known 
that investigation and inquiry led, or might lead, to doubt ; 
that doubt leads, or may lead, to heresy, and that heresy leads 
to hell. In other words, the Catholic Church has something 
more important than this world, more important than the 
well-being of man here. It regards this life as an opportunity 
for joining that Church, for accepting that creed, and for the 
saving of your soul. 

If the Catholic Church is right in its premises, it is right in 
its conclusion. If it is necessary to believe the Catholic creed 
in order to obtain eternal joy, then, of course, nothing else in 
this world is, comparatively speaking, of the slightest im- 
portance. Consequently, the Catholic Church has been, and 
still is, the enemy of intellectual freedom, of investigation, of 
inquiry — in other words, the enemy of progress in secular 
things. 

The result of this was an effort to compel all men to accept 
the belief necessary to salvation. This effort naturally divided 
itself into persuasion and persecution. 

It will be admitted that the good man is kind, merciful, 
charitable, forgiving and just. A church must be judged by 
the same standard. Has the church been merciful ? Has it 
been "fruitful in the good things" of justice, charity and 
forgiveness? Can a good man, believing a good doctrine, 
persecute for opinion's sake ? If the Church imprisons a man 
for the expression of an honest opinion, is it not certain, either 
that the doctrine of the Church is wrong, or that the Church 
is bad? Both cannot be good. "Sanctity" without good- 
ness is impossible. Thousands of "saints" have been the 
most malicious of the human race. If the history of the world 



1 1 f : I 



52 ROME OR REASON. 

proves anything, it proves that the Catholic Church was for 
many centuries the most merciless institution that ever existed 
among men. I cannot believe that the instruments of per- 
secution were made and used by the eminently good ; neither 
can I believe that honest people were imprisoned, tortured, 
and burned at the stake by a Church that was "inexhaustibly 
fruitful in all good things. ' ' 

And let me say here that I have no Protestant prejudices 
against Catholicism, and have no Catholic prejudices against 
Protestantism. I regard all religions either without prejudice 
or with the same prejudice. They were all, according to my 
belief, devised by men, and all have for a foundation ignorance 
of this world and fear of the next. All the Gods have been 
made by men. They are all equally powerful and equally 
useless. I like some of them better than I do others, for the 
same reason that I admire some characters in fiction more than 
I do others. I prefer Miranda to Caliban, but have not the 
slightest idea that either of them existed. So I prefer Jupiter 
to Jehovah, although perfectly satisfied that both are myths. 
I believe myself to be in a frame of mind to justly and fairly 
consider the claims of different religions, believing as I do that 
all are wrong, and admitting as I do that there is some good 
in all. 

When one speaks of the "inexhaustible fruitfulness in all 
good things " of the Catholic Church, we remember the horrors 
and atrocities of the Inquisition — the rewards offered by the 
Roman Church for the capture and murder of honest men. 
We remember the Dominican Order, the members of which, 
upheld by the Vicar of Christ, pursued the heretics like sleuth 
hounds, through many centuries. 

The Church, "inexhaustible in fruitfulness in all good 
things," not only imprisoned and branded and burned the 
living, but violated the dead. It robbed graves, to the end 



ROME OR REASON. 53 

that it might convict corpses of heresy — to the end that it 
might take from widows their portions and from orphans their 
patrimony. . 

We remember the millions in the darkness of dungeons — 
the millions who perished by the sword — the vast multitudes 
destroyed in flames — those who were flayed alive — those who 
were blinded — those whose tongues were cut out — those into 
whose ears were poured molten lead — those whose eyes were 
deprived of their lids — those who were tortured and tormented 
in every way by which pain could be inflicted and human 
nature overcome. 

And we remember, too, the exultant cry of the Church over 
the bodies of her victims : ' ' Their bodies were burned here, 
but their souls are now tortured in hell." 

We remember that the Church, by treachery, bribery, per- 
jury, and the commission of every possible crime, got posses- 
sion and control of Christendom, and we know the use that 
was made of this power — that it was used to brutalize, degrade, 
stupefy, and {t sanctify" the children of men. We know also 
that the Vicars of Christ were persecutors for opinion's sake — 
that they sought to destroy the liberty of thought through 
fear — that they endeavored to make every brain a Bastile in 
which the mind should be a convict — that they endeavored to 
make every tongue a prisoner, watched by a familiar of the 
Inquisition — and that they threatened punishment here, im- 
prisonment here, burnings here, and, in the name of their God, 
eternal imprisonment and eternal burnings hereafter. 

We know, too, that the Catholic Church was, during all the 
years of its power, the enemy of every science. It preferred 
magic to medicine, relics to remedies, priests to physicians. 
It thought more of astrologers than of astronomers. It hated 
geologists — it persecuted the chemist, and imprisoned the 
naturalist, and opposed every discovery calculated to improve 
the condition of mankind. 



54 ROME OR REASON. 

It is impossible to forget the persecutions of the Cathari, the 
Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Hussites, the Huguenots, and 
of every sect that had the courage to think just a little for 
itself. Think of a woman — the mother of a family — taken 
from her children and burned, on account of her view as to 
the three natures of Jesus Christ. Think of the Catholic 
Church, — an institution with a Divine Founder, presided over 
by the agent of God — punishing a woman for giving a cup of 
cold water to a fellow being who had been anathematized. 
Think of this Church, "fruitful in all good things," launching 
its curse at an honest man — not only cursing him from the 
crown of his head to the soles of his feet with a fiendish peculi- 
arity, but having at the same time the impudence to call on 
God, and the Holy Ghost, and Jesus Christ, and the Virgin 
Mary, to join in the curse ; and to curse him not only here, 
but forever hereafter — calling upon all the saints and upon all 
the redeemed to join in a hallelujah of curses, so that earth and 
heaven should reverberate with countless curses launched at a 
human being simply for having expressed an honest thought. 

This Church, so "fruitful in all good things," invented 
crimes that it might punish. This Church tried men for a 
" suspicion of heresy " — imprisoned them for the vice of being 
suspected — stripped them of all they had on earth and allowed 
them to rot in dungeons, because they were guilty of the 
crime of having been suspected. This was a part of the Canon 
Law. 

It is too late to talk about the " invincible stability " of the 
Catholic Church. 

It was not invincible in the Seventh, in the Eighth, or in the 
Ninth centuries. It was not invincible in Germany in Luther's 
day. It was not invincible in the Low Countries. It was not 
invincible in Scotland, or in England. It was not invincible 
in France. It was not invincible In Italy. It is not supreme 



ROME OR REASON. 55 

in any intellectual centre of the world. It does not triumph in 
Paris, or Berlin ; it is not dominant in London, in England ; 
neither is it triumphant in the United States. It has not within 
its fold the philosophers, the statesmen, and the thinkers, who 
are the leaders of the human race. 

It is claimed that Catholicism ' ' interpenetrates all the na- 
tions of the civilized world, ' ' and that ' ' in some it holds the 
whole nation in its unity." 

I suppose the Catholic Church is more powerful in Spain 
than in any other nation. The history of this nation demon- 
strates the result of Catholic supremacy, the result of an ac- 
knowledgment by a people that a certain religion is too sacred 
to be examined. 

Without attempting in an article of this character to point 
out the many causes that contributed to the adoption of Cathol- 
icism by the Spanish people, it is enough to say that Spain, of 
all nations, has been and is the most thoroughly Catholic, and 
the most thoroughly interpenetrated and dominated by the 
spirit of the Church of Rome. 

Spain used the sword of the Church. In the name of relig- 
ion it endeavored to conquer the Infidel world. It drove 
from its territory the Moors, not because they were bad, not 
because they were idle and dishonest, but because they were 
Infidels. It expelled the Jews, not because they were ignorant 
or vicious, but because they were unbelievers. It drove out 
the Moriscoes, and deliberately made outcasts of the intelligent, 
the industrious, the honest and the useful, because they were 
not Catholics. It leaped like a wild beast upon the Low 
Countries, for the destruction of Protestantism. It covered 
the seas with its fleets, to destroy the intellectual liberty of 
man. And not only so — it established the Inquisition within 
its borders. It imprisoned the honest, it burned the noble, and 
succeeded after many years of devotion to the true faith, in 



56 ROME OR REASON. 

destroying the industry, the intelligence, the usefulness, the 
genius, the nobility and the wealth of a nation. It became a 
wreck, a jest of the conquered, and excited the pity of its 
former victims. 

In this period of degradation, the Catholic Church held ' ' the 
whole nation in its unity." 

At last Spain began to deviate from the path of the Church. 
It made a treaty with an Infidel power. In 1782 it became 
humble enough, and wise enough, to be friends with Turkey. 
It made treaties with Tripoli and Algiers and the Barbary 
States. It had become too poor to ransom the prisoners taken 
by these powers. It began to appreciate the fact that it could 
neither conquer nor convert the world by the sword. 

Spain has progressed in the arts and sciences, in all that 
tends to enrich and ennoble a nation, in the precise proportion 
that she has lost faith in the Catholic Church. This may be 
said of every other nation in Christendom. Torquemada is 
dead ; Castelar is alive. The dungeons of the Inquisition are 
empty, and a little light has penetrated the clouds and mists — 
not much, but a little. Spain is not yet clothed and in her 
right mind. A few years ago the cholera visited Madrid and 
other cities. Physicians were mobbed. Processions of saints 
carried the host through the streets for the purpose of staying 
the plague. The streets were not cleaned ; the sewers were 
filled. Filth and faith, old partners, reigned supreme. The 
Church, " eminent for its sanctity," stood in the light and cast 
its shadow on the ignorant and the prostrate. The Church, in 
its " inexhaustible fruitfulness in all good things," allowed its 
children to perish through ignorance, and used the diseases it 
had produced as an instrumentality to further enslave its 
votaries and its victims. 

No one will deny that many of its priests exhibited heroism 
of the highest order in visiting the sick and administering what 



ROME OR REASON. 57 

are called the consolations of religion to the dying, and in 
burying the dead. It is necessary neither to deny or disparage 
the self-denial and goodness of these men. But their religion 
did more than all other causes to produce the very evils that 
called for the exhibition of self-denial and heroism. One 
scientist in control of Madrid could have prevented the plague. 
In such cases, cleanliness is far better than "godliness;" 
science is superior to superstition ; drainage much better than 
divinity; therapeutics more excellent than theology. Good- 
ness is not enough — intelligence is necessary. Faith is not 
sufficient, creeds are helpless, and prayers fruitless. 

It is admitted that the Catholic Church exists in many na- 
tions ; that it is dominated, at least in a great degree, by the 
Bishop of Rome — that it is international in that sense, and that 
in that sense it has what may be called a "supernational unity." 
The same, however, is true of the Masonic fraternity. It exists 
in many nations, but it is not a national body. It is in the 
same sense extranational, in the same sense international, and 
has in the same sense a supernational unity. So the same may 
be said of other societies. This, however, does not tend to 
prove that anything supernational is supernatural. 

It is also admitted that in faith, worship, ceremonial, dis- 
cipline and government, the Catholic Church is substantially 
the same wherever it exists. This establishes the unity, but 
not the divinity, of the institution. 

The church that does not allow investigation, that teaches 
that all doubts are wicked, attains unity through tyranny, 
that is, monotony by repression. Wherever man has had 
something like freedom, differences have appeared, heresies 
have taken root, and the divisions have become permanent — 
new sects have been born and the Catholic Church has been 
weakened. The boast of unity is the confession of tyranny. 

It is insisted that the unity of the Church substantiates its 



58 ROME OR REASON. 

claim to divine origin. This is asserted over and over again, 
in many ways ; and yet in the Cardinal's article is found this 
strange mingling of boast and confession : " Was it only by the 
human power of man that the unity, external and internal, 
which for fourteen hundred years had been supreme, was once 
more restored in the Council of Constance, never to be broken 
again ? " 

By this it is admitted that the internal and external unity of 
the Catholic Church had been broken, and that it required 
more than human power to restore it. Then the boast is 
made that it will never be broken again. Yet it is asserted 
that the internal and external unity of the Catholic Church is 
the great fact that demonstrates its divine origin. 

Now if this internal and external unity was broken, and re- 
mained broken for years, there was an interval during which 
the Church had no internal or external unity, and during which 
the evidence of divine origin failed. The unity was broken in 
spite of the Divine Founder. This is admitted by the use of 
the word "again." The unbroken unity of the Church is 
asserted, and upon this assertion is based the claim of divine 
origin ; it is then admitted that the unity was broken. The 
argument is then shifted, and the claim is made that it required 
more than human power to restore the internal and external 
unity of the Church, and that the restoration, not the unity, is 
proof of the divine origin. Is there any contradiction beyond 
this? 

Let us state the case in another way. Let us suppose that a 
man has a sword which he claims was made by God, stating 
that the reason he knows that God made the sword is that it 
never had been and never could be broken. Now if it was 
afterwards ascertained that it had been broken, and the owner 
admitted that it had been, what would be thought of him if he 
then took the ground that it had been welded, and that the 
welding was the evidence that it was of divine origin ? 



ROME OR REASON. 59 

A prophecy is then indulged in, to the effect that the internal 
and external unity of the Church can never be broken again. 
It is admitted that it was broken — it is asserted that it was 
divinely restored — and then it is declared that it is never to be 
broken again. No reason is given for this prophecy ; it must 
be born of the facts already stated. Put in a form to be 
easily understood, it is this: 

We know that the unity of the Church can never be broken, 
because the Church is of divine origin. 

We know that it was broken ; but this does not weaken the 
argument, because it was restored by God, and it has not been 
broken since. 

Therefore, it never can be broken again. 
It is stated that the Catholic Church is immutable, and that 
its immutability establishes its claim to divine origin. Was it 
immutable when its unity, internal and external, was broken ? 
Was it precisely the same after its unity was broken that it was 
before? Was it precisely the same after its unity was divinely 
restored that it was while broken ? Was it universal while it 
was without unity? Which of the fragments was universal — 
which was immutable ? 

The fact that the Catholic Church is obedient to the pope, 
establishes, not the supernatural origin of the Church, but the 
mental slavery of its members. It establishes the fact that it is 
a successful organization ; that it is cunningly devised ; that it 
destroys the mental independence, and that whoever absolutely 
submits to its authority loses the jewel of his soul. 

The fact that Catholics are to a great extent obedient to the 
pope, establishes nothing except the thoroughness of the 
organization. 

How was the Roman empire formed? By what means did 
that Great Power hold in bondage the then known world ? 
How is it that a despotism is established ? How is it that the 



60 ROME OR REASON. 

few enslave the many ? How is it that the nobility live on the 
labor of peasants? The answer is in one word, Organization- 
The organized few triumph over the unorganized many. The 
few hold the sword and the purse. The unorganized are over- 
come in detail — terrorized, brutalized, robbed, conquered. 

We must remember that when Christianity was established 
the world was ignorant, credulous and cruel. The gospel with 
its idea of forgiveness — with its heaven and hell — was suited 
to the barbarians among whom it was preached. Let it be 
understood, once for all, that Christ had but little to do with 
Christianity. The people became convinced — being ignorant, 
stupid and credulous — that the Church held the keys of heaven 
and hell. The foundation for the most terrible mental tyranny 
that has existed among men was in this way laid. The Catho- 
lic Church enslaved to the extent of its power. It resorted to 
every possible form "of fraud ; it perverted every good instinct 
of the human heart; it rewarded every vice; it resorted to 
every artifice that ingenuity could devise, to reach the highest 
round of power. It tortured the accused to make them con- 
fess ; it tortured witnesses to compel the commission of per- 
jury; it tortured children for the purpose of making them 
convict their parents ; it compelled men to establish their own 
innocence ; it imprisoned without limit ; it had the malicious 
patience to wait ; it left the accused without trial, and left them 
in dungeons until released by death. There is no crime that 
the Catholic Church did not commit, — no cruelty that it did 
not practice, — no form of treachery that it did not reward, and 
no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and 
most powerful enemy of human rights. It did all that organiza- 
tion, cunning, piety, self-denial, heroism, treachery, zeal and 
brute force could do to enslave the children of men. It was 
the enemy of intelligence, the assassin of liberty, and the de- 
stroyer of progress. It loaded the noble with chains and the 



ROME OR REASON. 6l 

infamous with honors. In one hand it carried the alms dish, 
in the other a dagger. It argued with the sword, persuaded 
with poison, and convinced with the fagot. 

It is impossible to see how the divine origin of a Church can 
be established by showing that hundreds of bishops have 
visited the pope. 

Does the fact that millions of the faithful visit Mecca estab- 
lish the truth of the Koran ? Is it a scene for congratulation 
when the bishops of thirty nations kneel before a man ? Is it 
not humiliating to know that man is willing to kneel at the 
feet of man ? Could a noble man demand, or joyfully receive, 
the humiliation of his fellows ? 

As a rule, arrogance and humility go together. He who in 
power compels his fellow man to kneel, will himself kneel when 
weak. The tyrant is a cringer in power ; a cringer is a tyrant 
out of power. Great men stand face to face. They meet on 
equal terms. The cardinal who kneels in the presence of the 
pope, wants the bishop to kneel in his presence ; and the 
bishop who kneels demands that the priest shall kneel to him ; 
and the priest who kneels demands that they in lower orders 
shall kneel ; and all, from pope to the lowest — that is to say, 
from pope to exorcist, from pope to the one in charge of the 
bones of saints — all demand that the people, the laymen, those 
upon whom they live, shall kneel to them. 

The man of free and noble spirit will not kneel. Courage 
has no knees. 

Fear kneels, or falls upon its ashen face. 

The Cardinal insists that the pope is the Vicar of Christ, and 
that all popes have been. What is a Vicar of Christ ? He is 
a substitute in office. He stands in the place, or occupies the 
position in relation to the Church, in relation to the world, that 
Jesus Christ would occupy were he the pope at Rome. In 
other words, he takes Christ's place ; so that, according to the 



62 ROME OR REASON. 

doctrine of the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ himself is present 
in the person of the pope. 

We all know that a good man may employ a bad agent. A 
good king might leave his realm and put in his place a tyrant 
and a wretch. The good man, and the good king cannot 
certainly know what manner of man the agent is — what kind 
of person the vicar is — consequently the bad may be chosen. 
But if the king appointed a bad vicar, knowing him to be bad, 
knowing that he would oppress the people, knowing that he 
would imprison and burn the noble and generous, what excuse 
can be imagined for such a king ? 

Now if the Church is of divine origin, and if each pope is the 
Vicar of Jesus Christ, he must have been chosen by Jesus 
Christ; and when he was chosen, Christ must have known 
exactly what his vicar would do. Can we believe that an 
infinitely wise and good Being would chose immoral, dis- 
honest, ignorant, malicious, heartless, fiendish, and inhuman 
vicars ? 

The Cardinal admits that " the history of Christianity is the 
history of the Church, and that the history of the Church is 
the history of the Pontiffs," and he then declares that "the 
greatest statesmen and rulers that the world has ever seen are 
the Popes of Rome." 

Let me call attention to a few passages in Draper's " History 
of the Intellectual Development of Europe." 

" Constantine was one of the Vicars of Christ. Afterwards, 
Stephen IV. was chosen. The eyes of Constantine were then 
put out by Stephen, acting in Christ's place. The tongue of 
the Bishop Theodorus was amputated by the man who had 
been substituted for God. This bishop was left in a dungeon 
to perish of thirst. Pope Leo III. was seized in the street and 
forced into a church, where the nephews of Pope Adrian at- 
tempted to put out his eyes and cut off his tongue. His sue- 



ROME OR REASON. 63 

cessor, Stephen V., was driven ignominiously from Rome. 
His successor, Paschal I., was accused of blinding and murder- 
ing two ecclesiastics in the Lateran Palace. John VIII., unable 
to resist the Mohammedans, was compelled to pay them 
tribute. 

"At this time, the Bishop of Naples was in secret alliance 
with the Mohammedans, and they divided with this Catholic 
bishop the plunder they collected from other Catholics. This 
bishop was excommunicated by the pope ; afterwards he gave 
him absolution because he betrayed the chief Mohammedans, 
and assassinated others. There was an ecclesiastical conspiracy 
to murder the pope, and some of the treasures of the Church 
were seized, and the gate of St. Pancrazia was opened with 
false keys to admit the Saracens. Formosus, who had been 
engaged in these transactions, who had been excommunicated 
as a conspirator for the murder of Pope John, was himself 
elected pope in 891. Boniface VI. was his successor. He had 
been deposed from the diaconate and from the priesthood for 
his immoral and lewd life. Stephen VII. was the next pope, 
and he had the dead body of Formosus taken from the grave, 
clothed in papal habiliments, propped up in a chair and tried 
before a Council. The corpse was found guilty, three fingers 
were cut off and the body cast into the Tiber. Afterwards 
Stephen VII., this Vicar of Christ, was thrown into prison and 
strangled. 

u From 896 to 900, five popes were consecrated. Leo V., 
in less than two months after he became pope, was cast into 
prison by Christopher, one of his chaplains. This Christopher 
usurped his place, and in a little while was expelled from Rome 
by Sergius III., who became pope in 905. This pope lived in 
criminal intercourse with the celebrated Theodora, who with 
her daughters Morozia and Theodora, both prostitutes, exer- 
cised an extraordinary control over him. The love of Theodora 



64 ROME OR REASON. 

was also shared by John X. She gave him the Archbishopric 
of Revenna, and made him pope in 915. The daughter of 
Theodora overthrew this pope. She surprised him in the 
Lateran Palace. His brother, Peter, was killed; the pope 
was thrown into prison, where he was afterward murdered. 
Afterward, this Marozia, daughter of Theodora, made her own 
son pope, John XI. Many affirmed that Pope Sergius was his 
father, but his mother inclined to attribute him to her husband 
Alberic, whose brother Guido she afterward married. Another 
of her sons, Alberic, jealous of his brother John, the pope, cast 
him and their mother into prison. Alberic's son was then 
elected pope as John XII. 

"John was nineteen years old when he became the Vicar of 
Christ. His reign was characterized by the most shocking 
immoralities, so that the Emperor Otho I. was compelled by 
the German clergy to interfere. He was tried. It appeared 
that John had received bribes for the consecration of bishops ; 
that he had ordained one who was only ten years old ; that he 
was charged with incest, and with so many adulteries that the 
Lateran Palace had become a brothel. He put out the eyes 
of one ecclesiastic; he maimed another — both dying in con- 
sequence of their injuries. He was given to drunkenness and 
to gambling. He was deposed at last, and Leo VII. elected 
in his stead. Subsequently he got the upper hand. He seized 
his antagonists; he cut off the hand of one, the nose, the 
finger, and the tongue of others. His life was eventually 
brought to an end by the vengeance of a man whose wife he 
had seduced." 

And yet, I admit that the most infamous popes, the most 
heartless and fiendish bishops, friars, and priests were models 
of mercy, charity, and justice when compared with the ortho- 
dox God — with the God they worshiped. These popes, these 
bishops, these priests could persecute only for a few years — 



ROME OR REASON. 65 

they could burn only for a few moments — but their God 
threatened to imprison and burn forever ; and their God is 
as much worse than they were, as hell is worse than the 
Inquisition. 

"John XIII. was strangled in prison. Boniface VII. im- 
prisoned Benedict: VII., and starved him to death. John 
XIV. was secretly put to death in the dungeons of the castle 
of St. Angelo. The corpse of Boniface was dragged by the 
populace through the streets." 

It must be remembered that the popes were assassinated by 
Catholics — murdered by the faithful — that one Vicar of Christ 
strangled another Vicar of Christ, and that these men were 
1 ' the greatest rulers and the greatest statesmen of the 
earth." 

"Pope John XVI. was seized, his eyes put out, his nose 
cut off, his tongue torn from his mouth, and he was sent 
through the streets mounted on an ass, with his face to the 
tail. Benedict IX., a boy of less than twelve years of age, 
was raised to the apostolic throne. One of his successors, 
Victor III., declared that the life of Benedict was so shameful, 
so foul, so execrable, that he shuddered to describe it. He 
ruled like a captain of banditti. The people, unable to bear 
longer his adulteries, his homicides and his abominations, 
rose against him, and in despair of maintaining his position, 
he put up the papacy to auction, and it was bought by a Pres- 
byter named John, who became Gregory VI., in the year of 
grace 1045. Well may we ask, Were these the Vicegerents 
of God upon earth — these, who had truly reached that goal 
beyond which the last effort, of human wickedness cannot 
pass?" 

It may be sufficient to say that there is no crime that man 
can commit that has not been committed by the Vicars of 
Christ. They have inflicted every possible torture, violated 



66 ROME OR REASON. 

every natural right. Greater monsters the human race has 
not produced. 

Among the " some two hundred and fifty-eight " Vicars of 
Christ there were probably some good men. This would have 
happened even if the intention had been to get all bad men, 
for the reason that man reaches perfection neither in good nor 
in evil ; but if they were selected by Christ himself, if they 
were selected by a church with a divine origin and under di- 
vine guidance, then there is no way to account for the selec- 
tion of a bad one. If one hypocrite was duly elected pope — 
one murderer, one strangler, one starver — this demonstrates 
that all the popes were selected by men, and by men only, 
and that the claim of divine guidance is born of zeal and ut- 
tered without knowledge. 

But who were the Vicars of Christ ? How many have there 
been ? Cardinal Manning himself does not know. He is not 
sure. He says : " Starting from St. Peter to Leo XIII., there 
have been some two hundred and fifty-eight Pontiffs claiming 
to be recognized by the whole Catholic unity as successors of 
St. Peter and Vicars of Jesus Christ." Why did he use the 
word ' ' some ' ' ? Why * ' claiming ' ' ? Does he not positively 
know ? Is it possible that the present Vicar of Christ is not 
certain as to the number of his predecessors ? Is he infallible 
in faith and fallible in fact ? 

Robert G. Ingersoll. 



ROME OR REASON? 



A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING. 



PART II. 



" If we live thus tamely, — 
To be thus jaded by a piece of scarlet, — 
Farewell nobility." 

NO ONE will deny that " the pope speaks to many people 
in many nations ; that he treats with empires and gov- 
ernments," and that "neither from Canterbury nor from Con- 
stantinople such a voice goes forth." 

How does the pope speak ? What does he say ? 

He speaks against the liberty of man — against the progress 
of the human race. He speaks to calumniate thinkers, and to 
warn the faithful against the discoveries of science. He speaks 
for the destruction of civilization. 

Who listens ? Do astronomers, geologists and scientists 
put the hand to the ear fearing that an accent may be lost? 
Does France listen? Does Italy hear? Is not the Church 
weakest at its centre ? Do those who have raised Italy from 
the dead, and placed her again among the great nations, pay 
attention ? Does Great Britain care for this voice — this moan, 
this groan — of the Middle Ages? Do the words of Leo XIII. 
impress the intelligence of the Great Republic? Can anything 
be more absurd than for the vicar of Christ to attack a dem- 

(67) 



68 ROME OR REASON. 

onstration of science with a passage of Scripture, or a quota- 
tion from one of the ' ' Fathers ' ' ? 

Compare the popes with the kings and queens of England. 
Infinite wisdom had but little to do with the selection of these 
monarchs, and yet they were far better than any equal number 
of consecutive popes. This is faint praise, even for kings and 
queens, but it shows that chance succeeded in getting better 
rulers for England than ' ' Infinite Wisdom ' ' did for the Church 
of Rome. Compare the popes with the presidents of the Re- 
public elected by the people. If Adams had murdered Wash- 
ington, and Jefferson had imprisoned Adams, and if Madison 
had cut out Jefferson's tongue, and Monroe had assassinated 
Madison, and John Quincy Adams had poisoned Monroe, and 
General Jackson had hung Adams and his Cabinet, we might 
say that presidents had been as virtuous as popes. But if this 
had happened, the verdict of the world would be that the peo- 
ple are not capable of selecting their presidents. 

But this voice from Rome is growing feebler day by day ; so 
feeble that the Cardinal admits that the vicar of God, and the 
supernatural Church, " are being tormented by Falck laws, by 
Mancini laws and by Crispi laws." In other words, this repre- 
sentative of God, this substitute of Christ, this Church of di- 
vine origin, this supernatural institution — pervaded by the 
Holy Ghost — are being " tormented" by three politicians. 
Is it possible that this patriotic trinity is more powerful than 
the other ? 

It is claimed that if the Catholic Church " be only a human 
system, built up by the intellect, will and energy of men, the 
adversaries must prove it — that the burden is upon them." 

As a general thing, institutions are natural. If this Church 
is supernatural, it is the one exception. The affirmative is with 
those who claim that it is of divine origin. So far as we know, 
all governments and all creeds are the work of man. No one 



ROME OR REASON. 69 

believes that Rome was a supernatural production, and yet its 
beginnings were as small as those of the Catholic Church. 
Commencing in weakness, Rome grew, and fought, and con- 
quered, until it was believed that the sky bent above a subju- 
gated world. And yet all was natural. For every effect there 
was an efficient cause. 

The catholic asserts that all other religions have been pro- 
duced by man — that Brahminism and Buddhism, the religion 
of Isis and Osiris, the marvelous mythologies of Greece and 
Rome, were the work of the human mind. From these relig- 
ions Catholicism has borrowed. Long before Catholicism 
was born, it was believed that women had borne children 
whose fathers were gods. The Trinity was promulgated in 
Egypt centuries before the birth of Moses. Celibacy was 
taught by the ancient Nazarenes and Essenes, by the priests of 
Egypt and India, by mendicant monks, and by the piously 
insane of many countries long before the Apostles lived. The 
Chinese tell us that "when there were but one man and one 
woman upon the earth, the woman refused to sacrifice her 
virginity even to people the globe ; and the gods, honoring 
her purity, granted that she should conceive beneath the gaze 
of her lover's eyes, and a virgin mother became the parent of 
humanity. 

The founders of many religions have insisted that it was the 
duty of man to renounce the pleasures of sense, and millions 
before our era took the vows of chastity, poverty and obedi- 
ence, and most cheerfully lived upon the labor of others. 

The sacraments of baptism and confirmation are far older 
than the church of Rome. The Eucharist is pagan. Long 
before popes began to murder each other, pagans ate cakes 
— the flesh of Ceres, and drank wine — the blood of Bacchus. 
Holy water flowed in the Ganges and Nile, priests interceded 
for the people, and anointed the dying. 



70 ROME OR REASON. 

It will not do to say that every successful religion that has 
taught unnatural doctrines, unnatural practices, must of neces- 
sity have been of divine origin. In most religions there has 
been a strange mingling of the good and bad, of the merciful 
and cruel, of the loving and malicious. Buddhism taught the 
universal brotherhood of man, insisted on the development of 
the mind, and this religion was propagated not by the sword, 
but by preaching, by persuasion, and by kindness — yet in 
many things it was contrary to the human will, contrary to 
the human passions, and contrary to good sense. Buddhism 
succeeded. Can we, for this reason, say that it is a super- 
natural religion ? Is the unnatural the supernatural ? 

It is insisted that, while other churches have changed, the 
Catholic Church alone has remained the same, and that this 
fact demonstrates its divine origin. 

Has the creed of Buddhism changed in three thousand 
years ? Is intellectual stagnation a demonstration of divine 
origin ? When anything refuses to grow, are we certain that 
the seed was planted by God ? If the Catholic church is the 
same to-day that it has been for many centuries, this proves 
that there has been no intellectual development. If men do 
not differ upon religious subjects, it is because they do not 
think. 

Differentiation is the law of growth, of progress. Every 
church must gain or lose ; it cannot remain the same ; it must 
decay or grow. The facl: that the Catholic church has not 
grown — that it has been petrified from the first — does not es- 
tablish divine origin ; it simply establishes the fact that it 
retards the progress of man. Everything in nature changes — 
every atom is in motion — every star moves. Nations, insti- 
tutions and individuals have youth, manhood, old age, death. 
This is and will be true of the Catholic Church. It was once 
weak — it grew stronger — it reached its climax of power — it 



ROME OR REASON. 71 

began to decay — it never can rise again. It is confronted by 
the dawn of Science. In the presence of the nineteenth cen- 
tury it cowers. 

It is not true that "All natural causes run to disinte- 
gration." 

Natural causes run to integration as well as to disintegra- 
tion. All growth is integration, and all growth is natural. 
All decay is disintegration, and all decay is natural. Nature 
builds and nature destroys. When the acorn grows — when 
the sunlight and rain fall upon it and the oak rises — so far as 
the oak is concerned "all natural causes " do not " run to 
disintegration." But there comes a time when the oak has 
reached its limit, and then the forces of nature run towards 
disintegration, and finally the old oak falls. But if the Car- 
dinal is right — if if all natural causes run to disintegration," 
then every success must have been of divine origin, and noth- 
ing is natural but destruction. This is Catholic science : 
" All natural causes run to disintegration." What do these 
causes find to disintegrate ? Nothing that is natural. The 
fact that the thing is not disintegrated shows that it was and 
is of supernatural origin. According to the Cardinal, the 
only business of nature is to disentegrate the supernatural. 
To prevent this, the supernatural needs the protection of the 
Infinite. According to this doctrine, if anything lives and 
grows, it does so in spite of nature. Growth, then, is not in 
accordance with, but in opposition to nature. Every plant is 
supernatural — it defeats the disintegrating influences of rain 
and light. The generalization of the Cardinal is half the 
truth. It would be equally true to say : All natural causes 
run to integration. But the whole truth is that growth and 
decay are equal. 

The Cardinal asserts that " Christendom was created by the 
world-wide Church as we see it before our eyes at this day. 



72 ROME OR REASON. 

Philosophers and statesmen believe it to be the work of their 
own hands ; they did not make it, but they have for three 
hundred years been unmaking it by reformations and rev- 
olutions. 

The meaning of this is that Christendom was far better three 
hundred years ago than now : that during these three centu- 
ries Christendom has been going towards barbarism. It means 
that the supernatural Church of God has been a failure for 
three hundred years : that it has been unable to withstand the 
attacks of philosophers and statesmen, and that it has been 
helpless in the midst of " reformations and revolutions." 

What was the condition of the world three hundred years 
ago, the period, according to the Cardinal, in which the 
Church reached the height of its influence, and since which 
it has been unable to withstand the rising tide of reformation 
and the whirlwind of revolution ? 

In that blessed time, Philip II. was king of Spain — he with 
the cramped head and the monstrous jaw. Heretics were 
hunted like wild and poisonous beasts ; the inquisition was 
firmly established, and priests were busy with rack and fire. 
With a zeal born of the hatred of man and the love of God, 
the Church, with every instrument of torture, touched every 
nerve in the human body. 

In those happpy days, the Duke of Alva was devastating 
the homes of Holland ; heretics were buried alive — their 
tongues were torn from their mouths, their lids from their 
eyes ; the Armada was on the sea for the destruction of the 
heretics of England, and the Moriscoes — a million and a half 
of industrious people — were being driven by sword and flame 
from their homes. The Jews had been expelled from Spain. 
This Catholic country had succeeded in driving intelligence 
and industry from its territory ; and this had been done with 
a cruelty, with a ferocity, unequaled in the annals of crime. 



ROME OR REASON. 73 

Nothing was left but ignorance, bigotry, intolerance, credulity, 
the Inquisition, the seven sacraments and the seven deadly 
sins. And yet a Cardinal of the nineteenth century, living in 
the land of Shakespeare, regrets the change that has been 
wrought by the intellectual efforts, by the discoveries, by the 
inventions and heroism of three hundred years. 

Three hundred years ago, Charles IX., in France, son of 
Catherine de Medici, in the year of grace 1572 — after nearly 
sixteen centuries of Catholic Christianity — after hundreds of 
vicars of Christ had sat in St. Peter's chair — after the natural 
passions of man had been " softened" by the creed of Rome 
— came the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the result of a con- 
spiracy between the Vicar of Christ, Philip II., Charles IX. , 
and his fiendish mother. Let the Cardinal read the account 
of this massacre once more, and, after reading it, imagine that 
he sees the gashed and mutilated bodies of thousands of men 
and women, and then let him say that he regrets the revolu- 
tions and reformations of three hundred years. 

About three hundred years ago Clement VIII., Vicar of 
Christ, acting in God's place, substitute of the Infinite, perse- 
cuted Giordano Bruno even unto death. This great, this sub- 
lime man, was tried for heresy. He had ventured to assert the 
rotary motion of the earth ; he had hazarded the conjecture 
that there were in the fields of infinite space worlds larger and 
more glorious than ours. For these low and groveling 
thoughts, for this contradiction of the word and vicar of God, 
this man was imprisoned for many years. But his noble 
spirit was not broken, and finally, in the year 1600, by the 
orders of the infamous Vicar, he was chained to the stake. 
Priests believing in the doctrine of universal forgiveness — 
priests who when smitten upon one cheek turned the other — 
carried with a kind of ferocious joy fagots to the feet of this 
incomparable man. These disciples of "Our Lord" were 



74 ROME OR REASON. 

made joyous as the flames, like serpents, climbed around the 
body of Bruno. In a few moments the brave thinker was 
dead, and the priests who had burned him fell upon their 
knees and asked the infinite God to continue the blessed work 
forever in hell. 

There are two things that cannot exist in the same universe 
— an infinite God and a martyr. 

Does the Cardinal regret that kings and emperors are not 
now engaged in the extermination of Protestants ? Does he 
regret that dungeons of the Inquisition are no longer crowded 
with the best and bravest ? Does he long for the fires of the 
auto da fe ? 

In coming to a conclusion .as to the origin of the Catholic 
Church — in determining the truth of the claim of infallibility — 
we are not restricted to the physical achievements of that 
Church, or to the history of its propagation, or to the rapidity 
of its growth. 

This Church has a creed ; and if this Church is of divine 
origin — if its head is the vicar of Christ, and, as such, infallible 
in matters of faith and morals, this creed must be true. Let 
us start with the supposition that God exists, and that he is 
infinitely wise, powerful and good — and this is only a supposi- 
tion. Now, if the creed is foolish, absurd and cruel, it cannot 
be of divine origin. We find in this creed the following : 

" Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary 
that he hold the Catholic faith." 

It is not necessary, before all things, that he be good, honest, 
merciful, charitable and just. Creed is more important than 
conduct. The most important of all things is, that he hold 
the Catholic faith. There were thousands of years during 
which it was not necessary to hold that faith, because that faith 
did not exist ; and yet during that time the virtues were just 
as important as now, just as important as they ever can be. 



ROME OR REASON. 75 

Millions of the noblest of the human race never heard of this 
creed. Millions of the bravest and best have heard of it, 
examined, and rejected it. Millions of the most infamous have 
believed it, and because of their belief, or notwithstanding their 
belief, have murdered millions of their fellows. We know that 
men can be, have been, and are just as wicked with it as with- 
out it. We know that it is not necessary to believe it to be 
good, loving, tender, noble and self-denying. We admit that 
millions who have believed it have also been self-denying and 
heroic, and that millions, by such belief, were not prevented 
from torturing and destroying the helpless. 

Now if all who believed it were good, and all who rejected it 
were bad, then there might be some propriety in saying that 
11 whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that 
he hold the Catholic faith. ' ' But as the experience of mankind 
is otherwise, the declaration becomes absurd, ignorant and 
cruel. 

There is still another clause : 

"Which faith, except every one do keep entire and invio- 
late, without doubt, he shall everlastingly perish." 

We now have both sides of this wonderful truth : The be- 
liever will be saved, the unbeliever will be lost. We know that 
faith is not the child or servant of the will. We know that be- 
lief is a conclusion based upon what the mind supposes to be 
true. We know that it is not an act of the will. Nothing can 
be more absurd than to save a man because he is not intelligent 
enough to accept the truth, and nothing can be more infamous 
than to damn a man because he is intelligent enough to reject 
the false. It resolves itself into a question of intelligence. If 
the creed is true, then a man rejects it because he lacks intelli- 
gence. Is this a crime for which a man should everlastingly 
perish ? If the creed is false, then a man accepts it because he 
lacks intelligence. In both cases the crime is exactly the same. 



76 ROME OR REASON. 

If a man is to be damned for rejecting the truth, certainly he 
should not be saved for accepting the false. This one clause 
demonstrates that a being of infinite wisdom and goodness did 
not write it. It also demonstrates that it was the work of men 
who had neither wisdom nor a sense of justice. 

What is this Catholic faith that must be held ? It is this : 

" That we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, 
neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance." 

Why should an Infinite Being demand worship ? Why 
should one God wish to be worshipped as three ? Why should 
three Gods wish to be worshipped as one ? Why should we 
pray to one God and think of three, or pray to three Gods 
and think of one ? Can this increase the happiness of the one 
or of the three ? Is it possible to think of one as three, or of 
three as one ? If you think of three as one, can you think of 
one as none, or of none as one? When you think of three as 
one, what do you do with the other two ? You must not " con- 
found the persons " — they must be kept separate. When you 
think of one as three, how do you get the other two ? You 
must not "divide the substance." Is it possible to write 
greater contradictions than these ? 

This creed demonstrates the human origin of the Catholic 
Church. Nothing could be more unjust than to punish man 
for unbelief — for the expression of honest thought — for having 
been guided by his reason — for having acted in accordance 
with his best judgment. 

Another claim is made, to the effect "that the Catholic 
Church has filled the world with the true knowledge of the one 
true God, and that it has destroyed all idols by light instead 
of by fire." 

The Catholic Church described the true God as a being who 
would inflict internal pain on his weak and erring children ; 
described him as a fickle, quick-tempered, unreasonable deity, 



ROME OR REASON. 77 

whom honesty enraged, and whom flattery governed ; one who 
loved to see fear upon its knees, ignorance with closed eyes and 
open mouth; one who delighted in useless self-denial, who 
loved to hear the sighs and sobs of suffering nuns, as they lay 
prostrate on dungeon floors ; one who was delighted when the 
husband deserted his family and lived alone in some cave in 
the far wilderness, tormented by dreams and driven to insanity 
by prayer and penance, by fasting and faith. 

According to the Catholic Church, the true God enjoyed 
the agonies of heretics. He loved the smell of their burning 
flesh ; he applauded with wide palms when philosophers were 
flayed alive, and to him the auto da fe was a divine comedy. 
The shrieks of wives, the cries of babes when fathers were 
being burned, gave contrast, heightened the effect and filled 
his cup with joy. This true God did not know the shape of 
the earth he had made, and had forgotten the orbits of the 
stars. M The stream of light which descended from the begin- 
ning" was propagated by fagot to fagot, until Christendom 
was filled with the devouring fires of faith. 

It may also be said that the Catholic Church filled the world 
with the true knowledge of the one true Devil. It filled the 
air with malicious phantoms, crowded innocent sleep with leer- 
ing fiends, and gave the world to the domination of witches 
and wizards, spirits and spooks, goblins and ghosts, and 
butchered and burned thousands for the commission of impos- 
sible crimes. 

It is contended that : " In this true knowledge of the Divine 
Nature was revealed to man their own relation to a Creator as 
sons to a Father." 

This tender relation was revealed by the Catholics to the 
Pagans, the Arians, the Cathari, the Waldenses, the Albi- 
genses, the heretics, the Jews, the Moriscoes, the Protestants — 
to the natives of the West Indies, of Mexico, of Peru — to phi- 



78 ROME OR REASON. 

losophers, patriots and thinkers. All these victims were 
taught to regard the true God as a loving father, and this les- 
son was taught with every instrument of torture — with brand- 
ings and burnings, with flayings and flames. The world was 
filled with cruelty and credulity, ignorance and intolerance, 
and the soil in which all these horrors grew was the true 
knowledge of the one true God, and the true knowledge of the 
one true Devil. And yet, we are compelled to say, that the 
one true Devil described by the Catholic Church was not as 
malevolent as the one true God. 

Is it true that the Catholic Church overthrew idolatry ? What 
is idolatry? What shall we say of the worship of popes — of 
the doctrine of the Real Presence, of divine honors paid to 
saints, of sacred vestments, of holy water, of consecrated cups 
and plates, of images and relics, of amulets and charms ? 

The Catholic Church filled the world with the spirit of idol- 
atry. It abandoned the idea of continuity in nature, it denied 
the integrity of cause and effect. The government of the 
world was the composite result of the caprice of God, the mal- 
ice of Satan, the prayers of the faithful — softened, it may be, 
by the charity of Chance. Yet the Cardinal asserts, without 
the preface of a smile, that ' ' Demonology was overthrown by 
the Church, with the assistance of forces that were above na- 
ture; " and in the same breath gives birth to this enlightened 
statement: " Beelzebub is not divided against himself." Is a 
belief in Beelzebub a belief in demonology ? Has the Cardi- 
nal forgotten the Council of Nice, held in the year of grace 787, 
that declared the worship of images to be lawful ? Did that 
infallible Council, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, de- 
stroy idolatry ? 

The Cardinal takes the ground that marriage is a sacrament, 
and therefore indissoluble, and he also insists that celibacy is 
far better than marriage, — holier than a sacrament, — that mar- 



ROME OR REASON. 79 

riage is not the highest state, but that ' ' the state of virginity 
unto death is the highest condition of man and woman." 

The highest ideal of a family is where all are equal — where 
love has superseded authority — where each seeks the good of 
all, and where none obey — where no religion can sunder 
hearts, and with which no church can interfere. 

The real marriage is based on mutual affection — the cere- 
mony is but the outward evidence of the inward flame. To 
this contract there are but two parties. The Church is an 
impudent intruder. Marriage is made public to the end that 
the real contract may be known, so that the world can see that 
the parties have been actuated by the highest and holiest mo- 
tives that find expression in the acts of human beings. The 
man and woman are not joined together by God, or by the 
Church, or by the State. The Church and State may pre- 
scribe certain ceremonies, certain formalities — but all these are 
only evidence of the existence of a sacred fact in the hearts of 
the wedded. The indissolubility of marriage is a dogma that 
has filled the lives of millions with agony and tears. It has 
given a perpetual excuse for vice and immorality. Fear has 
borne children begotten by brutality. Countless women have 
endured the insults, indignities and cruelties of fiendish hus- 
bands, because they thought that it was the will of God. The 
contract of marriage is the most important that human beings 
can make ; but no contract can be so important as to release 
one of the parties from the obligation of performance; and no 
contract, whether made between man and woman, or between 
them and God, after a failure of consideration caused by the 
willful act of the man or woman, can hold and bind the inno- 
cent and honest. 

Do the believers in indissoluble marriage treat their wives 
better than others ? A little while ago, a woman said to a man 
who had raised his hand to strike her: " Do not touch me; 
you have no right to beat me; I am not your wife." 



80 ROME OR REASON. 

About a year ago a husband, who God in his infinite wis- 
dom had joined to a loving and patient woman in the indisso- 
luble sacrament of marriage, becoming enraged, seized the 
helpless wife and tore out one of her eyes. She forgave him. 
A few weeks ago he deliberately repeated this frightful crime, 
leaving his victim totally blind. Would it not have been bet- 
ter if man, before the poor woman was blinded, had put asun- 
der whom God had joined together? Thousands of husbands, 
who insist that marriage is indissoluble, are the beaters of 
wives. 

The law of the Church has created neither the purity nor 
the peace of domestic life. Back of all churches is human 
affection. Back of all theologies is the love of the human 
heart. Back of all your priests and creeds is the adoration of 
the one woman by the one man, and of the one man by the one 
woman. Back of your faith is the fireside — back of your folly 
is the family ; and back of all your holy mistakes and your 
sacred absurdities is the love of husband and wife, of parent 
and child. 

It is not true that neither the Greek nor the Roman world 
had any true conception of a home. The splendid story of 
Ulysses and Penelope, the parting of Hector and Andromache, 
demonstrate that a true conception of home existed among 
the Greeks. Before the establishment of Christianity, the Ro- 
man matron commanded the admiration of the then known 
world. She was free and noble. The Church degraded wo- 
man — made her the property of the husband, and trampled 
her beneath its brutal feet. The ' ' fathers " denounced woman 
as a perpetual temptation, as the cause of all evil. The Church 
worshipped a God who had upheld polygamy, and had pro- 
nounced his curse on woman, and had declared that she should 
be the serf of the husband. This Church followed the teach- 
ings of St. Paul. It taught the uncleanness of marriage, and 



ROME OR REASON. 8 1 

insisted that all children were conceived in sin. This Church 
pretended to have been founded by one who offered a reward 
in this world, and eternal joy in the next, to husbands who 
would forsake their wives and children and follow him. Did 
this tend to the elevation of woman ? Did this detestable doc- 
trine "create the purity and peace of domestic life" ? Is it 
true that a monk is purer than a good and noble father ? — that 
a nun is holier than a loving mother? 

Is there anything deeper and stronger than a mother's love ? 
Is there anything purer, holier than a mother holding her 
dimpled babe against her billowed breast ? 

The good man is useful, the best man is the most useful. 
Those who fill the nights with barren prayers and holy hun- 
ger, torture themselves for their own good and not for the 
benefit of others. They are earning eternal glory for them- 
selves — they do not fast for their fellow men — their selfishness 
is only equalled by their foolishness. Compare the monk in 
his selfish cell, counting beads and saying prayers for the 
purpose of saving - his barren soul, with a husband and father 
sitting by his fireside with wife and children. Compare the 
nun with the mother and her babe. 

Celibacy is the essence of vulgarity. It tries to put a stain 
upon motherhood, upon marriage, upon love — that is to say, 
upon all that is holiest in the human heart. Take love from 
the world, and there is nothing left worth living for. The 
Church has treated this great, this sublime, this unspeakably 
holy passion, as though it polluted the heart. They have 
placed the love of God above the love of woman, above the 
love of man. Human love is generous and noble. The love 
of God is selfish, because man does not love God for God's 
sake, but for his own. 

Yet the Cardinal asserts "that the change wrought by 
Christianity in the social, political and international relations 



82 ROME OR REASON. 

of the world" — " that the root of this ethical change, private 
and public, is the Christian home." A moment afterwards, 
this prelate insists that celibacy is far better than marriage. If 
the world could be induced to live in accordance with the 
1 ' highest state, ' ' this generation would be the last. Why were 
men and women created ? Why did not the Catholic God 
commence with the sinless and sexless ? The Cardinal ought 
to take the ground that to talk well is good, but that to be 
dumb is the highest condition; that hearing is a pleasure, but 
that deafness is ecstasy; and that to think, to reason, is very 
well, but that to be a Catholic is far better. 

Why should we desire the destruction of human passions ? 
Take passions from human beings and what is left ? The 
great object should be not to destroy passions, but to make 
them obedient to the intellect. To indulge passion to. the 
utmost is one form of intemperance — to destroy passion is an- 
other. The reasonable gratification of passion under the dom- 
ination of the intellect is true wisdom and perfect virtue. 

The goodness, the sympathy, the self-denial of the nun, of 
the monk, all come from the mother-instinct, the father-in- 
stinct — all were produced by human affection, by the love ol 
man for woman, of woman for man. Love is a transfigura- 
tion. It ennobles, purifies and glorifies. In true marriage 
two hearts burst into flower. Two lives unite. They melt 
in music. Every moment is a melody. Love is a revela- 
tion, a creation. From love the world borrows its beauty and 
the heavens their glory. Justice, self-denial, charity and pity 
are the children of love. Lover, wife, mother, husband, 
father, child, home — these words shed light — they are the 
gems of human speech. Without love all glory fades, the 
noble falls from life, art dies, music loses meaning and becomes 
mere motions of the air, and virtue ceases to exist. 

It is asserted that this life of celibacy is above and against 



ROME OR REASON. 83 

the tendencies of human nature ; and the Cardinal then asks : 
11 Who will ascribe this to natural causes, and, if so, why did 
it not appear in the first four thousand years ? " 

If there is in a system of religion a doctrine, a dogma, or a 
practice against the tendencies of human nature — if this relig- 
ion succeeds, then it is claimed by the Cardinal that such 
religion must be of divine origin. Is it "against the tenden- 
cies of human nature " for a mother to throw her child into 
the Ganges to please a supposed God ? Yet a religion that 
insisted on that sacrifice succeeded, and has, to-day, more be- 
lievers than the Catholic Church can boast. 

Religions, like nations and individuals, have always gone 
along the line of least resistance. Nothing has " ascended the 
stream of human license by a power mightier than nature." 
There is no such power. There never was, there never can 
be, a miracle. We know that man is a conditioned being. 
We know that he is affected by a change of conditions. If he 
is ignorant he is superstitious ; this is natural. If his brain is 
developed — if he perceives clearly that all things are naturally 
produced, he ceases to be superstitious, and becomes scien- 
tific. He is not a saint, but a savant — not a priest, but a phi- 
losopher. He does not worship, he works ; he investigates ; 
he thinks ; he takes advantage, through intelligence, of the 
forces of nature. He is no longer the victim of appearances, 
the dupe of his own ignorance, and the persecutor of his 
fellow men. 

He then knows that it is far better to love his wife and chil- 
dren than to love God. He then knows that the love of man 
for woman, of woman for man, of parent for child, of child for 
parent, is far better, far holier than the love of man for any 
phantom born of ignorance and fear. 

It is illogical to take the ground that the world was cruel 
and ignorant and idolatrous when the Catholic Church was 



84 ROME OR REASON. 

established, and that because the world is better now than 
then, the Church is of divine origin. 

What was the world when science came ? What was it in 
the days of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler ? What was it 
when printing was invented ? What was it when the Western 
World was found ? Would it not be much easier to prove 
that science is of divine origin ? 

Science does not persecute. It does not shed blood — it 
fills the world with light. It cares nothing for heresy; it 
develops the mind, and enables man to answer his own prayers. 

Cardinal Manning takes the ground that Jehovah practically 
abandoned the children of men for four thousand years, and 
gave them over to every abomination. He claims that Chris- 
tianity came " in the fullness of time," and it is then admitted 
that ' ' what the fullness of time may mean is one of the myste- 
ries of times and seasons, that it is not for us to know." Hav- 
ing declared that it is a mystery, and one that we are not to 
know, the Cardinal explains it: " One motive for the long de- 
lay of four thousand years is not far to seek — it gave time, full 
and ample, for the utmost development and consolidation of 
all the falsehood and evil of which the intellect and will of man 
are capable." 

Is it possible to imagine why an infinitely good and wise 
being ' ' gave time full and ample for the utmost development 
and consolidation of falsehood and evil" ? Why should an 
infinitely wise God desire this development and consolidation ? 
What would be thought of a father who should refuse to teach 
his son and deliberately allow him to go into every possible 
excess, to the end that he might ' ' develop all the falsehood 
and evil of which his intellect and will were capable ? " If a 
supernatural religion is a necessity, and if without it all men 
simply develop and consolidate falshood and evil, why was 
not a supernatural religion given to the first man ? The Cath- 



ROME OR REASON. 85 

olic Church, if this be true, should have been founded in the 
garden of Eden. 

Was it not cruel to drown a world just for the want 
of a supernatural religion — a religion that man, by no 
possibility, could furnish? Was there " husbandry in 
heaven?" 

But the Cardinal contradicts himself by not only admitting, 
but declaring, that the world had never seen a legislation so 
just, so equitable, as that of Rome. 

Is it possible that a nation in which falsehood and evil 
had reached their highest development was, after all, so 
wise, so just and so equitable ? 

Was not the civil law far better than the Mosaic — more 
philosophical, nearer just? 

The civil law was produced without the assistance of God. 

According to the Cardinal, it was produced by men in 
whom all the falsehood and evil of which they were capa- 
ble had been developed and consolidated, while the cruel 
and ignorant Mosaic code came from the lips of infinite wis- 
dom and compassion. 

It is declared that the history of Rome shows what man can 
do without God, and I assert that the history of the Inqui- 
sition shows what man can do when assisted by a church 
of divine origin, presided over by the infallible vicars of 
God. 

The fact that the early Christians not only believed incredi- 
ble things, but persuaded others of their truth, is regarded by 
the Cardinal as a miracle. This is only another phase of the 
old argument that success is the test of divine origin. All 
supernatural religions have been founded in precisely the same 
way. The credulity of eighteen hundred years ago believed 
everything except the truth. 

A religion is a growth, and is of necessity adapted in some 



86 ROME OR REASON. 

degree to the people among whom it grows. It is shaped and 
molded by the general ignorance, the superstition and credulity 
of the age in which it lives. The key is fashioned by 
the lock. 

Every religion that has succeeded has in some way supplied 
the wants of its votaries, and has to a certain extent harmo- 
nized with their hopes, their fears, their vices, and their 
virtues. 

If, as the Cardinal says, the religion of Christ is in absolute 
harmony with nature, how can it be supernatural ? The Car- 
dinal also declares that il the religion of Christ is in harmony 
with the reason and moral nature in all nations and all ages to 
this day." 

What becomes of the argument that Catholicism must be 
of divine origin because "it has ascended the stream of 
human license, contra ictum Jluminis, by a power mightier 
than nature?" 

If ' ' it is in harmony with the reason and moral nature 
of all nations and all ages to this day," it has gone 
with the stream, and not against it. If "the religion of 
Christ is in harmony with the reason and moral nature of all 
nations," then the men who have rejected it are unnatural, 
and these men have gone against the stream. How then can 
it be said that Christianity has been in changeless opposition 
to nature as man has marred it ? To what extent has man 
marred it ? 

In spite of the marring by man, we are told that the reason 
and moral nature of all nations in all ages to this day is in 
harmony with the religion of Jesus Christ. 

Are we justified in saying that the Catholic Church is of 
divine origin because the Pagans failed to destroy it by perse- 
cution ? 

We will put the Cardinal's statement in form: 



ROME OR REASON. 87 

Paganism failed to destroy Catholicism by persecution, there- 
fore Catholicism is of divine origin. 

Let us make an application of this logic: 

Paganism failed to destroy Catholicism by persecution; 
therefore, Catholicism is of divine origin. 

Catholicism failed to destroy Protestantism by persecution; 
therefore, Protestantism is of divine origin. 

Catholicism and Protestantism combined failed to destroy 
Infidelity; therefore, Infidelity is of divine origin. 

Let us make another application: 

Paganism did not succeed in destroying Catholicism; there- 
fore, Paganism was a false religion. 

Catholicism did not succeed in destroying Protestantism; 
therefore, Catholicism is a false religion. 

Catholicism and Protestantism combined failed to destroy 
Infidelity; therefore, both Catholicism and Protestantism are 
false religions. 

The Cardinal has another reason for believing the Catholic 
Church of divine origin. He declares that the "Canon Law 
is a creation of wisdom and justice to which no statutes at 
large or imperial pandects can bear comparison; " " that the 
world-wide and secular legislation of the Church was of a 
higher character, and that as water cannot rise above its 
source, the Church could not, by mere human wisdom, have 
corrected and perfected the imperial law, and therefore its 
source must have been higher than the sources of the 
world." 

When Europe was the most ignorant, the Canon Law was 
supreme. 

As a matter of fact, the good in the Canon Law was 
borrowed — the bad was, for the most part, original. In 
my judgment, the legislation of the republic of the United 
States is in many respects superior to that of Rome, and yet 



88 ROME OR REASON. 

we are greatly indebted to the Civil Law. Our legislation is 
superior in many particulars to that of England, and yet we 
are greatly indebted to the Common Law ; but it never 
occurred to me that our Statutes at Large are divinely 
inspired. 

If the Canon Law is, in fact, the legislation of infinite wis- 
dom, then it should be a perfect code. Yet, the Canon Law 
made it a crime next to robbery and theft to take interest for 
money. Without the right to take interest the business of the 
whole world, would to a large extent, cease and the prosperity 
of mankind end. There are railways enough in the United States 
to make six tracks around the globe, and every mile was built 
with borrowed money on which interest was paid or prom- 
ised. In no other way could the savings of many thousands 
have been brought together and a capital great enough 
formed to construct works of such vast and continental 
importance. 

It was provided in this same wonderful Canon Law that a 
heretic could not be a witness against a Catholic. The Catholic 
was at liberty to rob and wrong his fellow man, provided the 
fellow man was not a fellow Catholic, and in a court estab- 
lished by the Vicar of Christ, the man who had been robbed 
was not allowed to open his mouth. A Catholic could enter 
the house of an unbeliever, of a Jew, of a heretic, of a Moor, and 
before the eyes of the husband and father murder his wife and 
children, and the father could not pronounce in the hearing of 
a judge the name of the murderer. 

The world is wiser now, and the Canon Law, given to 
us by infinite wisdom, has been repealed by the common 
sense of man. 

In this divine code it was provided that to convict a cardi- 
nal bishop, seventy-two witnesses were required; a cardinal 
presbyter, forty-four; a cardinal deacon, twenty-four; a sub- 



ROME OR REASON. 89 

deacon, acolyth, exorcist, reader, ostiarius, seven ; and in the 
purgation of a bishop, twelve witnesses were invariably- 
required; of a presbyter, seven; of a deacon, three. These 
laws, in my judgment, were made, not by God, but by the 
clergy. 

So too in this cruel code it was provided that those who 
gave aid, favor, or counsel, to excommunicated persons, 
should be anathema, and that those who talked with, con- 
sulted, or sat at the same table with or gave anything in charity 
to the excommunicated should be anathema. 

Is it possible that a being of infinite wisdom made hospi- 
tality a crime? Did he say: "Whoso giveth a cup of cold 
water to the excommunicated shall wear forever a garment of 
fire ? " Were not the laws of the Romans much better ? Be- 
sides all this, under the Canon Law the dead could be tried 
for heresy, and their estates confiscated — that is to say, their 
widows and orphans robbed. 

The most brutal part of the common law of England is 
that in relation to the rights of women — all of which was taken 
from the Corpus Juris Canonici, i ' the law that came from a 
higher source than man." 

The only cause of absolute divorce as laid down by the 
pious canonists was propter infidelitatem, which was when one 
of the parties became Catholic, and would not live with the 
other who continued still an unbeliever. Under this divine 
statute, a pagan wishing to be rid of his wife had only to join 
the Catholic Church, provided she remained faithful to the 
religion of her fathers. Under this divine law, a man marry- 
ing a widow was declared to be a bigamist. 

It would require volumes to point out the cruelties, absurd- 
ities and inconsistencies of the Canon Law. It has been 
thrown away by the world. Every civilized nation has a code 
of its own, and the Canon Law is of interest only to the his- 



90 ROME OR REASON. 

torian, the antiquarian, and the enemy of theological govern- 
ment. 

Under the Canon Law, people were convicted of being 
witches and wizards, of holding intercourse with devils. 
Thousands perished at the stake, having been convicted of 
these impossible crimes. Under the Canon Law, there was 
such a crime as the suspicion of heresy. A man or woman 
could be arrested, charged with being suspected, and under 
this Canon Law, flowing from the intellect of infinite wisdom, 
the presumption was in favor of guilt. The suspected had to 
prove themselves innocent. In all civilized courts, the pre- 
sumption of innocence is the shield of the indicted, but the 
Canon Law took away this shield, and put in the hand of the 
priest the sword of presumptive guilt. 

If the real pope is the vicar of Christ, the true shepherd of 
the sheep, this fact should be known not only to the vicar, 
but to the sheep. A divinely founded and guarded church 
ought to know its own shepherd, and yet the Catholic sheep 
have not always been certain who the shepherd was. 

The Council of Pisa, held in 1409, deposed two popes — 
rivals — Gregory and Benedict — that is to say, deposed the 
actual vicar of Christ and the pretended. This action was 
taken because a council, enlightened by the Holy Ghost, could 
not tell the genuine from the counterfeit. The council then 
elected another vicar, whose authority was afterwards denied. 
Alexander V. died, and John XXIII. took his place; Gregory 
XII. insisted that he was the lawful pope; John resigned, then 
he was deposed, and afterwards imprisoned; then Gregory 
XII. resigned, and Martin V. was elected. The whole thing 
reads like the annals of a South American revolution. 

The Council of Constance restored, as the Cardinal de- 
clares, the unity of the Church, and brought back the conso- 
lation of the Holy Ghost. Before this great council John 



ROME OR REASON. 91 

Huss appeared and maintained his own tenets. The council 
declared that the Church was not bound to keep its promise 
with a heretic. Huss was condemned and executed on the 
6th of July, 1415. His disciple, Jerome of Prague, recanted, 
but having relapsed, was put to death, May 30, 1416. This 
cursed council shed the blood of Huss and Jerome. 

The Cardinal appeals to the author of " Ecce Homo " for 
the purpose of showing that Christianity is above nature, and 
the following passages, among others, are quoted: 

"Who can describe that which unites men? Who has 
entered into the formation of speech, which is the symbol of 
their union ? Who can describe exhaustively the origin of 
civil society ? He who can do these things can explain the 
origin of the Christian Church." 

These passages should not have been quoted by the Cardi- 
nal. The author of these passages simply says that the origin 
of the Christian Church is no harder to find and describe than 
that which unites men — than that which has entered into the 
formation of speech, the symbol of their union — no harder to 
describe than the origin of civil society — because he says that 
one who can describe these can describe the other. 

Certainly none of these things are above nature. We do 
not need the assistance of the Holy Ghost in these matters. 
We know that men are united by common interests, common 
purposes, common dangers — by race, climate and education. 
It is no more wonderful that people live in families, tribes, 
communities and nations, than that birds, ants and bees live 
in flocks and swarms. 

If we know anything, we know that language is natural — 
that it is a physical science. But if we take the ground occu- 
pied by the Cardinal, then we insist that everything that can- 
not be accounted for by man, is supernatural. Let me ask, 
by what man ? What man must we take as the standard ? 



92 ROME OR REASON. 

Cosmas or Humboldt, St. Irenaeus or Darwin? If every- 
thing that we cannot account for is above nature, then igno- 
rance is the test of the supernatural. The man who is men- 
tally honest, stops where his knowledge stops. At that point 
he says that he does not know. Such a man is a philosopher. 
Then the theologian steps forward, denounces the modesty of 
the philosopher as blasphemy, and proceeds to tell what is be- 
yond the horizon of the human intellect. 

Could a savage account for the telegraph, or the telephone 
by natural causes? How would he account for these won- 
ders ? He would account for them precisely as the Cardinal 
accounts for the Catholic Church. 

Belonging to no rival church, I have not the slightest inter- 
est in the primacy of Leo XIII., and yet it is to be regretted 
that this primacy rests upon such a narrow and insecure foun- 
dation. 

The Cardinal says that "it will appear almost certain that 
the original Greek of St. Irenaeus, which is unfortunately lost, 
contained either ra Trpureia, or some inflection of ttp^tevo), which 
signifies primacy." 

From this it appears that the primacy of the Bishop of 
Rome rests on some ' ' inflection ' ' of a Greek word — and that 
this supposed inflection was in a letter supposed to have been 
written by St. Irenaeus, which has certainly been lost. Is it 
possible that the vast fabric of papal power has this, and only 
this, for its foundation ? To this ' ' inflection ' ' has it come at 
last? 

The Cardinal's case depends upon the intelligence and 
veracity of his witnesses. The Fathers of the Church were 
utterly incapable of examining a question of fact. They were 
all believers in the miraculous. The same is true of the Apos- 
tles. If St. John was the author of the Apocalypse, he was 
undoubtedly insane. If Polycarp said the things attributed to 



ROME OR REASON. 93 

him by Catholic writers, he was certainly in the condition of 
his master. What is the testimony of St. John worth in the 
light of the following? " Cerinthus, the heretic, was in a 
bath-house. St. John and another Christian were about to 
enter. St. John cried out: ' Let us run away, lest the house 
fall upon us while the enemy of truth is in it.' " Is it possible 
that St. John thought that God would kill two eminent Chris- 
tians for the purpose of getting even with one heretic ? 

Let us see who Polycarp was. He seems to have been a 
prototype of the Catholic Church, as will be seen from the fol- 
lowing statement concerning this Father: " When any heret- 
ical doctrine was spoken in his presence he would stop his 
ears." After this, there can be no question of his orthodoxy. 
It is claimed that Polycarp was a martyr — that a spear was 
run through his body, and that from the wound his soul, in 
the shape of a bird, flew away. The history of his death is 
just as true as the history of his life. 

Irenaeus, another witness, took the ground that there was 
to be a millennium — a thousand years of enjoyment in which 
celibacy would not be the highest form of virtue. If he is 
called as a witness for the purpose of establishing the divine 
origin of the Church, and if one of his "inflections" is the 
basis of papal supremacy, is the Cardinal also willing to take 
his testimony as to the nature of the millennium ? 

All the Fathers were infinitely credulous. Every one of 
them believed, not only in the miracles said to have been 
wrought by Christ, by the Apostles, and by other Christians, 
but every one of them believed in the Pagan miracles. All of 
these Fathers were familiar with wonders and impossibilities. 
Nothing was so common with them as to work miracles, and 
on many occasions they not only cured diseases, not only 
reversed the order of nature, but succeeded in raising the 
dead. 



94 ROME OR REASON, 

It is very hard, indeed, to prove what the apostles said, or 
what the Fathers of the Church wrote. There were many 
centuries filled with forgeries — many generations in which the 
cunning hands of ecclesiastics erased, obliterated or interpo- 
lated the records of the past — during which they invented 
books, invented authors, and quoted from works that never 
existed. 

The testimony of the ' ' Fathers ' ' is without the slightest 
value. They believed everything — they examined nothing. 
They received as a waste-basket receives. Whoever accepts 
their testimony will exclaim with the Cardinal: "Happily, 
men are not saved by logic." 

Robert G. Ingersoll. 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 



By Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop Henry C. Potter, and 
Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll. 



THE attention of the public has been particularly directed 
of late to the abuses of divorce, and to the facilities 
afforded by the complexities of American law, and by the 
looseness of its administration, for the disruption of family 
ties. Therefore The North American Review, has opened 
its pages for the thorough discussion of the subject in its moral, 
social, and religious aspects, and some of the most eminent 
leaders of modern thought have contributed their opinions. 
The Rev. S. W. Dike, LL.D., who is a specialist on the sub- 
ject of divorce, has prepared some statistics touching the mat- 
ter, and, with the assistance of Bishop Potter, the four follow- 
ing questions have been formulated as a basis for the dis- 
cussion : 

1. Do you believe in the principle of divorce under any circum- 
stances ? 

2. Ought divorced people to be allowed to marry under any cir- 
cumstances ? 

3. What is the effect of divorce on the integrity of the family? 

4. Does the absolute prohibition of divorce where it exists contri- 
bute to the moral purity of society ? 

(g 5 y Editor North American Review. 



96 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

Introduction by the Rev. S. W. Dike, LL.D. 

I AM to introduce this discussion with some facts and make 
a few suggestions upon them. In the dozen years of my work 
at this problem I have steadily insisted upon a broad basis of 
fact as the only foundation of sound opinion. We now have 
a great statistical advance in the report of the Department of 
labor, A few of these statistics will serve the present purpose. 

There were in the United States 9,937 divorces reported for 
the year 1867 and 25,535 for 1886, or a total 328,716 in the 
twenty years. This increase is more than twice as great as the 
population, and has been remarkably uniform throughout the 
period. With the exception of New York, perhaps Delaware, 
and the three or four States where special legislative reforms 
have been secured, the increase covers the country and has 
been more than twice the gain in population. The South ap- 
parently felt the movement later than the North and West, but 
its greater rapidity there will apparently soon obliterate most 
existing differences. The movement is well-nigh as universal 
in Europe as here. Thirteen European countries, including 
Canada, had 6,540 divorces in 1876 and 10,909 in 1886 — an 
increase of 67 per cent. In the same period the increase with 
us was 72.5 per cent. But the ratios of divorce to population 
are here generally three or four times greater than in Europe. 
The ratios to marriage in the United States are sometimes as 
high as 1 to 10, 1 to 9, or even a little more for single years. 
In heathen Japan for three years they were more than 1 to 3. 
But divorce there is almost wholly left to the regulation of the 
family, and practically optional with the parties. It is a re- 
transferrence of gthe wife by a simple writing to her own 
family. 

1. The increase of divorce is one of several evils affecting 
the family. Among these are hasty or ill-considered mar- 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 97 

riages, the decline of marriage and the decrease of children, — 
too generally among classes pecuniarily best able to maintain 
domestic life, — the probable increase in some directions of 
marital infidelity and sexual vice, and last, but not least, a 
tendency to reduce the family to a minimum of force in the 
life of society. All these evils should be studied and treated 
in their relations to each other. Carefully-conducted inves- 
tigations alone can establish these latter statements beyond 
dispute, although there can be little doubt of their general 
correctness as here carefully made. And the conclusion is 
forced upon us that the toleration of the increase of divorce, 
touching as it does the vital bond of the family, is so far forth 
a confession of our western civilization that it despairs of all 
remedies for ills of the family, and is becoming willing, in 
great degree, to look away from all true remedies to a disso- 
lution of the family by the courts in all serious cases. If this 
were our settled purpose, it would look like giving up the 
idea of producing and protecting a family increasingly capa- 
ble of enduring to the end of its natural existence. If the 
drift of things on this subject during the present century may 
be taken as prophetic, our civilization moves in an opposite 
direction in its treatment of the family from its course with the 
individual. 

2. Divorce, including these other evils related to the family, 
is preeminently a social problem. It should therefore be 
reached by all the forces of our great social institutions— re- 
ligious, educational, industrial, and political. Each of these 
should be brought to bear on it proportionately and in coop- 
eration with the others. But I can here take up only one or 
two lines for further suggestion. 

3. The causes of divorces, like those of most social evils, 
are often many and intricate. The statistics for this country, 
when the forty-three various statutory causes are reduced to a 



98 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

few classes, show that 20 per cent, of the divorces were based 
on adultery, 16 on cruelty, 38 were granted for desertion, 4 
for drunkenness, less than 3 for neglect to provide, and so on. 
But these tell very little, except that it is easier or more con- 
genial to use one or another of the statutory causes, just as the 
old "omnibus clause," which gave general discretion to the 
courts in Connecticut, and still more in some other States, was 
made to cover many cases. A special study of forty-five coun- 
ties in twelve States, however, shows that drunkenness was a 
director indirect cause in 20. 1 per cent, of 29,665 cases. That 
is, it could be found either alone or in conjunction with others, 
directly or indirectly, in one-fifth of the cases. 

4. Laws and their administration affect divorce. New York 
grants absolute divorce for only one cause, and New Jersey 
for two. Yet New York has many more divorces in propor- 
tion to population, due largely to a looser system of adminis- 
tration. In seventy counties of twelve States 68 per cent, of 
the applications are granted. The enactment of a more strin- 
gent law is immediately followed by a decrease of divorces, 
from which there is a tendency to recover. Personally, I 
think stricter methods of administration, restrictions upon 
remarriage, proper delays in hearing suits, and some penal 
inflictions for cruelty, desertion, neglect of support, as well as 
for adultery, would greatly reduce divorces, even without 
removing a single statutory cause. There would be fewer 
unhappy families, not more. For people would then look to 
real remedies instead of confessing the hopelessness of remedy 
by appeals to the courts. A multitude of petty ills and many 
utterly wicked frauds and other abuses would disappear. 
" Your present methods," said a Nova Scotian to a man from 
Maine a few years ago, ' ' are simply ways of multiplying and 
magnifying domestic ills." There is much force in this. But 
let us put reform of marriage laws along with these measures. 



IS DIVORCE WRONG ? 99 

5. The evils of conflicting and diverse marriage and divorce 
laws are doing immense harm. The mischief through which 
innocent parties are defrauded, children rendered illegitimate, 
inheritance made uncertain, and actual imprisonments for big- 
amy grow out of divorce and remarriage, are well known to 
most. Uniformity through a national law or by conventions 
of the States has been strongly urged for many years. Uni- 
formity is needed. But for one, I have long discouraged too 
early action, because the problem is too difficult, the conse- 
quences too serious, and the elements of it still too far out of 
our reach for any really wise action at present. The govern- 
ment report grew immediately out of this conviction. It will, 
I think, abundantly justify the caution. For it shows that 
uniformity could affect at the utmost only a small percentage 
of the total divorces in the United States. Only 19.9 per cent, 
of all the divorced who were married in this coimtry obtained 
their divorces in a different State from the one in which their 
marriage had taken place, in all these twenty years, 80.1 per 
cent, having been divorced in the State where married. Now, 
marriage on the average lasts 9.17 years before divorce 
occurs, which probably is nearly two-fifths the length of a mar- 
ried life before its dissolution by death. From this 19.9 per 
cent, there must, therefore, be subtracted the large migration 
of married couples for legitimate purposes, in order to get any 
fair figure to express the migration for divorce. But the move- 
ment of the native population away from the State of birth is 
22 or 23 per cent. This, however, includes all ages. For all 
who believe that divorce itself is generally a great evil, the 
conclusion is apparently inevitable that the question of uni- 
formity, serious as it is, is a very small part of the great legal 
problem demanding solution at our hands. This general 
problem, aside from its graver features in the more immediate 
sphere of sociology and religion, must evidently tax our pub- 



IOO IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

Heists and statesmen severely. The old temptation to meet 
special evils by general legislation besets us on this subject. I 
think comparative and historical study of the law of the fam- 
ily, (the Familienrecht of the Germans), especially if the move- 
ment of European law be seen, points toward the need of a 
pretty comprehensive and thorough examination of our spe- 
cific legal problem of divorce and marriage law in this fuller 
light, before much legislation is undertaken. 

Samuel W. Dike. 



However much men may differ in their views of the nature 
and attributes of the matrimonial contract, and in their concept 
of the rights and obligations of the marriage state, no one will 
deny that these are grave questions; since upon marriage rests 
the family, and upon the family rest society, civilization, and 
the highest interests of religion and the state. Yet, strange 
to say, divorce, the deadly enemy of marriage, stalks abroad 
to-day bold and unblushing, a monster licensed by the laws of 
Christian states to break hearts, wreck homes and ruin souls. 
And passing strange is it, too, that so many, wise and far-see- 
ing in less weighty concerns, do not appear to see in the ever- 
growing power of divorce a menace not only to the sacredness 
of the marriage institution, but even to the fair social fabric 
reared upon matrimony as its corner-stone. 

God instituted in Paradise the marriage state and sanctified 
it. He established its law of unity and declared its indissolu- 
bility. By divine authority Adam spoke when of his wife he 
said: "This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; 
she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. 
Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall 
cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh."* But 
like other things on earth, marriage suffered in the fall; and 

*Gen., ii., 23-24. 



IS DIVORCE WRONG f IOI 

little by little polygamy and divorce began to assert themselves 
against the law of matrimonial unity and indissolubility. Yet 
the ideal of the marriage institution never faded away. It 
survived, not only among the chosen people, but even among 
the nations of heathendom, disfigured much, 'tis true, but 
with its ancient beauty never wholly destroyed. 

When, in the fullness of time, Christ came to restore the 
things that were perishing, he reasserted in clear and unequiv- 
ocal terms the sanctity, unity, and indissolubility of marriage. 
Nay, more. He gave to this state added holiness and a dig- 
nity higher far than it had " from the beginning." He made 
marriage a sacrament, made it the type of his own never- 
ending union with his one spotless spouse, the church. St. 
Paul, writing to the Ephesians, says: "Husbands, love your 
wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself 
up for it, that he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver 
of water in the word of life, that he might present it to himself 
a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such 
thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish. So 
also ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. . . . 
For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and 
shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh."* 

In defence of Christian marriage, the church was compelled 
from the earliest days of her existence to do frequent and stern 
battle. But cultured pagan, and rough barbarian, and 
haughty Christian lord were met and conquered. Men were 
taught to master passion, and Christian marriage, with all its 
rights secured and reverenced, became a ruling power in the 
world. 

The Council of Trent, called, in the throes of the mighty 
moral upheaval of the sixteenth century, to deal with the new 
state of things, again proclaimed to a believing and an unbe- 
*Ephes., v., 25-31. 



102 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

lieving world the Catholic doctrine of the holiness, unity, and 
indissolubility of marriage, and the unlawfulness of divorce. 
The council declared no new dogmas: it simply reaffirmed the 
common teaching of the church for centuries. But some of 
the most hallowed attributes of marriage seemed to be objects 
of peculiar detestation to the new teachers, and their abolition 
was soon demanded. " The leaders in the changes of matri- 
monial law," writes Professor Woolsey, " were the Protestant 
reformers themselves, and that almost from the beginning of 
the movement. . . . The reformers, when they discarded the 
sacramental view of marriage and the celibacy of the clergy, 
had to make out a new doctrine of marriage and of divorce. ' '* 
The " new doctrine of marriage and of divorce," pleasing as 
it was to the sensual man, was speedily learned and as speedily 
put in practice. The sacredness with which Christian mar- 
riage had been hedged around began to be more and more 
openly trespassed upon, and restive shoulders wearied more 
and more quickly of the marriage yoke when divorce prom- 
ised freedom for newer joys. 

To our own time the logical consequences of the ' ' new doc- 
trine" have come. To-day "abyss calls upon abyss," change 
calls for change, laxity calls for license. Divorce is now a 
recognized presence in high life and low; and polygamy, the 
first-born of divorce, sits shameless in palace and in hovel. 
Yet the teacher that feared not to speak the words of truth in 
bygone ages is not silent now. In no uncertain tones, the 
church proclaims to the world to-day the unchangeable law of 
the strict unity and absolute indissolubility of valid and con- 
summated Christian marriage. 

To the question then, " Can divorce from the bond of mar- 
riage ever be allowed?" the Catholic can only answer no. 

* " Divorce and Divorce Legislation," by Theodore D. Woolsey, 
2d Ed., p. 126. 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? IO3 

And for this no, his first and last and best reason can be but 
this : ' ' Thus saith the Lord. ' ' 

As time goes on the wisdom of the church in absolutely for- 
bidding divorce from the marriage bond grows more and more 
plain even to the many who deny to this prohibition a divine 
and authoritative sanction. And nowhere is this more true 
than in our own country. Yet our experience of the evils of 
divorce is but the experience of every people that has cher- 
ished this monster. 

Let us take but a hasty view of the consequences of divorce 
in ancient times. Turn only to pagan Greece and Rome, two 
peoples that practised divorce most extensively. In both we 
find divorce weakening their primitive virtue and making their 
latter corruption more corrupt. Among the Greeks morality 
declined as material civilization advanced. Divorce grew easy 
and common, and purity and peace were banished from the 
family circle. Among the Romans divorce was not common 
until the latter days of the Republic. Then the flood-gates of 
immorality were opened, and, with divorce made easy, came 
rushing in corruption of morals among both sexes and in 
every walk of life. " Passion, interest, or caprice," Gibbon, 
the historian, tells us, " suggested daily motives for the disso- 
lution of marriage; a word, a sign, a message, a letter, the 
mandate of a freedman, declared the separation; the most ten- 
der of human connections was degraded to a transient society 
of profit or pleasure. ' ' * Each succeeding generation witnessed 
moral corruption more general, moral degradation more pro- 
found; men and women were no longer ashamed of licentious- 
ness; until at length the nation that became mighty because 
built on a pure family fell when its corner-stone crumbled 
away in rottenness. 

Heedless of the lessons taught by history, modern nations, 

* " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Milman's Ed., Vol. 
III., p. 236. 



104 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

too, have made trial of divorce. In Europe, wherever the 
new gospel of marriage and divorce has had notable influence, 
divorce has been legalized; and in due proportion to the extent 
of that influence causes for divorce have been multiplied, the 
bond of marriage more and more recklessly broken, and the 
obligations of that sacred state more and more shamelessly dis- 
regarded. In our own country the divorce evil has grown 
more rapidly than our growth and strengthened more rapidly 
than our strength. Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in a special report 
on the statistics of marriage and divorce made to Congress in 
February, 1889, places the number of divorces in the United 
States in 1867 at 9,937, and the number in 1886 at 25,535. 
These figures show an increase of the divorce evil much out 
of proportion to our increase in population. The knowledge 
that divorces can easily be procured encourages hasty mar- 
riages and equally hasty preparations. Legislators and judges 
in some States are encouraging inventive genius in the art of 
finding new causes for divorce. Frequently the most trivial 
and even ridiculous pretexts are recognized as sufficient for the 
rupture of the marriage bond; and in some States divorce can 
be obtained "without publicity," and even without the knowl- 
edge of the defendant — in such cases generally an innocent 
wife. Crime has sometimes been committed for the very pur- 
pose of bringing about a divorce, and cases are not rare in 
which plots have been laid to blacken the reputation of a vir- 
tuous spouse in order to obtain legal freedom for new nup- 
tials. Sometimes, too, there is a collusion between the mar- 
ried parties to obtain divorce. One of them trumps up 
charges ; the other does not oppose the suit ; and judgment is 
entered for the plaintiff. Every daily newspaper tells us of 
divorces applied for or granted, and the public sense of de- 
cency is constantly being shocked by the disgusting recital of 
of divorce-court scandals. 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 105 

We are filled with righteous indignation at Mormonism; we 
brand it as a national disgrace, and justly demand its suppres- 
sion. Why? Because, forsooth, the Mormons are polyga- 
mists. Do we forget that there are two species of polygamy — 
simultaneous and successive ? Mormons practise without legal 
recognition the first species; while among us the second species 
is indulged in, and with the sanction of law, by thousands in 
whose nostrils Mormonism is a stench and an abomination. 
The Christian press and pulpit of the land denounce the Mor- 
mons as "an adulterous generation," but too often deal very 
tenderly with Christian polygamists. Why ? Is Christian 
polygamy less odious in the eyes of God than Mormon polyg- 
amy? Among us, 'tis true, the one is looked upon as more 
respectable than the other. Yet we know that the Mormons as 
a class, care for their wives and children; while Christian 
polygamists but too often leave wretched wives to starve, 
slave, or sin, and leave miserable children a public charge. 
44 O divorced and much-married Christian," says the polyga- 
mous dweller by Salt Lake, ' ' pluck first the beam from thy 
own eye, and then shalt thou see to pluck the mote from the 
eye of thy much-married, but undivorced, Mormon brother." 

It follows logically from the Catholic doctrine of the unity 
and indissolubility of marriage, and the consequent prohibition 
of divorce from the marital bond, that no one, even though 
divorced a vinculo by the civil power, can be allowed by the 
church to take another consort during the lifetime of the true 
wife or husband, and such connection the church can but hold 
as sinful. It is written: 4< Whosoever shall put away his wife 
and marry another committeth adultery against her. And if 
the wife shall put away her husband, and be married to an- 
other, she committeth adultery."* Of course, I am well 
aware that upon the words of our Saviour as found in St. Mat- 

*Mark, x., 11, 12. 



106 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

thew, Chap, xix., 9, many base the right of divorce from the 
marriage bond for adultery, with permission to remarry. But, 
as is well known, the Catholic Church, upon the concurrent 
testimony of the Evangelists Mark* and Luke,f and upon the 
teaching of St. Paul, J interprets our Lord's words quoted by 
St. Matthew as simply permitting, on account of adultery, 
divorce from bed and board, with no right to either party to 
marry another. 

But even if divorce a vinculo were not forbidden by divine 
law, how inadequate a remedy would it be for the evils for 
which so many deem it a panacea. ' 4 Divorce a vinculo, ' ' as 
Dr. Brownson truly says, " logically involves divorce ad libi- 
tum.'^ Now, what reason is there to suppose that parties 
divorced and remated will be happier in the new connection 
than in the old ? As a matter of fact, many persons have been 
divorced a number of times. Sometimes, too, it happens 
that, after a period of separation, divorced parties repent of 
their folly, reunite, and are again divorced. Indeed, expe- 
rience clearly proves that unhappiness among married people 
frequently does not arise so much from ' ' mutual incompatibil- 
ity ' ' as from causes inherent in one or both of the parties — 
causes that would be likely to make a new union as wretched 
as the old one. There is wisdom in the pithy saying of a 
recent writer: " Much ill comes, not because men and women 
are married, but because they are fools. "|| 

There are some who think that the absolute prohibition of 
divorce does not contribute to the purity of society, and are 
therefore of opinion that divorce with liberty to remarry does 
good in this regard. He who believes the matrimonial bond 
indissoluble, divorce a vinculo evil, and the connection result- 

*Mark, x., n, 12. fLuke, xvi., 18. J I. Cor.,vii., 10, n. 
§ Essay on "The Family — Christian and Pagan." 
II Prof. David Swing in Chicago Journal. 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? I07 

ing from it criminal, can only say: " Evil should not be done 
that good may come." But, after all, would even passing 
good come from this greater freedom ? In a few exceptional 
cases — Yes : in the vast majority of cases — No. The trying 
of divorce as a safeguard of purity is an old experiment, and 
an unsuccessful one. In Rome adulteries increased as divorces 
were multiplied. After speaking of the facility and frequency 
of divorce among the Romans, Gibbon adds : 

' ' A specious theory is confuted by this free and perfect experiment, 
which demonstrates that the liberty of divorce does not contribute to 
happiness and virtue. The facility of separation would destroy all 
mutual confidence, and inflame every trifling dispute. The minute 
difference between a husband and a stranger, which might so easily 
be removed, might still more easily be forgotten."* 

How apropos in this connection are the words of Professor 
Woolsey : 

' ' Nothing is more startling than to pass from the first part of the 
eighteenth to this latter part of the nineteenth century, and to ob- 
serve how law has changed and opinion has altered in regard to mar- 
riage, the great foundation of society, and to divorce ; and how, 
almost pari passu, various offences against chastity, such as concu- 
binage, prostitution, illegitimate births, abortion, disinclination to 
family life, have increased also — not, indeed, at the same pace every- 
where, or all of them equally in all countries, yet have decidedly 
increased on the whole, "f 

Surely in few parts of the wide world is the truth of these 
strong words more evident than in those parts of our own 
country where loose divorce laws have long prevailed. 

It should be noted that, while never allowing the dissolu- 
tion of the marriage bond, the Catholic Church has always 
permitted, for grave causes and under certain conditions, a 
temporary or permanent "separation from bed and board." 

* " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Milman's Ed., Vol. 
III., p. 236. 
t " Divorce and Divorce Legislation," 2d Ed., p. 274. 



108 IS DIVORCE WRONG ? 

The causes which, positis ponendis, justify such separation may- 
be briefly given thus : mutual consent, adultery, and grave 
peril of soul or body. 

It may be said that there are persons so unhappily mated 
and so constituted that for them no relief can come save from 
divorce a vinculo, with permission to remarry. I shall not 
linger here to point out to such the need of seeking from a 
higher than earthly power the grace to suffer and be strong. 
But for those whose reasoning on this subject is of the earth, 
earthy, I shall add some words of practical worldly wisdom 
from eminent jurists. In a note to his edition of Blackstone's 
" Commentaries," Mr. John Taylor Coleridge says: 

" It is no less truly than beautifully said by Sir W. Scott, in the case 
of Evans v. Evans, that ' though in particular cases the repugnance of 
the law to dissolve the obligation of matrimonial cohabitation may 
operate with great severity upon individuals, yet it must be carefully 
remembered that the general happiness of the married life is secured 
by its indissolubility.' When people understand that they must live 
together, except for a few reasons known to the law, they learn to 
soften by mutual accommodation that yoke which they know they 
cannot shake off: they become good husbands and good wives from 
the necessity of remaining husbands and wives : for necessity is a 
powerful master in teaching the duties which it imposes. If it were 
once understood that upon mutual disgust married persons might be 
legally separated, many couples who now pass through the world 
with mutual comfort, with attention to their common offspring, and 
to the moral order of civil society, might have been at this moment 
living in a state of mutual unkindness, in a state of estrangement 
from their common offspring, and in a state of the most licentious 
and unrestrained immorality. In this case, as in many other cases, 
the happiness of some individuals must be sacrificed to the greater 
and more general good." 

The facility and frequency of divorce, and its lamentable con- 
sequences, are nowadays calling much attention to measures 
of "divorce reform." "How can divorce reform be best 
secured?" it may be asked. Believing, as I do, that divorce 
is evil, I also believe that its "reformation" and its death 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? IO 

must be simultaneous. It should cease to be. Divorce as 
we know it began when marriage was removed from the do- 
main of the church : divorce shall cease when the old order 
shall be restored. Will this ever come to pass ? Perhaps so 
— after many days. Meanwhile, something might be done, 
something should be done, to lessen the evils of divorce. 
Our present divorce legislation! must be presumed to be such 
as the majority of the people wish it. A first step, therefore, 
in the way of " divorce reform " should be the creation of a 
more healthy public sentiment on this question. Then will 
follow measures that will do good in proportion to their 
stringency. A few practical suggestions as to the salient 
features of remedial divorce legislation may not be out of 
place. Persons seeking at the hands of the civil law relief in 
matrimonial troubles should have the right to ask for divorce 
a vinculo, or simple separation a mensd et thoro, as they may 
elect. The number of legally-recognized grounds for divorce 
should be lessened, and "noiseless" divorces forbidden, 
" Rapid-transit" facilities for passing through divorce courts 
should be cut off, and divorce "agencies " should be sup- 
pressed. The plaintiff in a divorce case should be a bona fide 
resident of the judicial district in which his petition is filed, 
and in every divorce case the legal representatives of the State 
should appear for the defendant, and, by all means, the right 
of remarriage after divorce should be restricted. If divorce 
cannot be legislated out of existence, let, at least, its power 
for evil be diminished. 

James Cardinal Gibbons. 



I AM asked certain questions with regard to the attitude of 
the Episcopal Church towards the matter of divorce. In un- 
dertaking to answer them, it is to be remembered that there 
is a considerable variety of opinion which is held in more or 



IIO IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

less precise conformity with doctrinal or canonical declarations 
of the church. With these variations this paper, except in so 
far as it may briefly indicate them, is not concerned. Nor is 
it an expression of individual opinion. That is not what has 
been asked for or attempted. 

The doctrine and law of the Protestant Episcopal Church 
on the subject of divorce is contained in canon 13, title II., of 
the "Digest of the Canons," 1887. That canon has been to 
a certain extent interpreted by Episcopal judgments under 
section IV. The " public opinion " of the clergy or laity can 
only be ascertained in the usual way ; especially by examin- 
ing their published treatises, letters, etc., and perhaps most 
satisfactorily by the reports of discussion in the diocesan and 
general conventions on the subject of divorce. Among mem- 
bers of the Protestant Episcopal Church divorce is excessively 
rare, cases of uncertainty in the application of the canon are 
much more rare, and the practice of the clergy is almost per- 
fectly uniform. There is, however, by no means the same 
uniformity in their opinions either as to divorce or marriage. 

As divorce is necessarily a mere accident of marriage, and 
as divorce is impossible without a precedent marriage, much 
practical difficulty might arise, and much difference of opinion 
does arise, from the fact that the Protestant Episcopal Church 
has nowhere defined marriage. Negatively, it is explicitly 
affirmed (Article XXV.) that "matrimony is not to be 
counted for a sacrament of the Gospel." This might seem 
to reduce matrimony to a civil contract. And accordingly 
the first rubric in the Form of Solemnization of Matrimony 
directs, on the ground of differences of laws in the various 
States, that " the minister is left to the direction of those laws 
in everything that regards the civil contract between the par- 
ties." Laws determining what persons shall be capable of 
contracting would seem to be included in ' ' everything that 



IS DIVORCE WRONG.'* Ill 

regards the civil contract ; " and unquestionably the laws of 
most of the States render all persons legally divorced capable 
of at once contracting a new marriage. Both the first section 
of canon 13 and the Form of Solemnization, affirm that, "if 
any persons be joined together otherwise than as God's word 
doth allow, their marriage is not lawful." But it is nowhere, 
excepting as to divorce, declared what the impediments are. 
The Protestant Episcopal Church has never, by canon or 
express legislation, published, for instance, a table of prohib- 
ited degrees. 

On the matter of divorce, however, canon 13, title II., 
supersedes, for the members of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church, both a part of the civil law relating to the persons 
capable of contracting marriage, and also all private judgment 
as to the teaching of "the Word of God" on that subject. 
No minister is allowed, as a rule, to solemnize the marriage of 
any man or woman who has a divorced husband or wife still 
living. But if the person seeking to be married is the inno- 
cent party in the divorce for adultery, that person, whether 
man or woman, may be married by a minister of the church. 
With the above exception, the clergy are forbidden to admin- 
ister the sacraments to any divorced and remarried person 
without the express permission of the bishop, unless that per- 
son be "penitent" and "in imminent danger of death." 
Any doubts " as to the facts of any case under section II. of 
this canon" must be referred to the bishop. Of course, where 
there is no reasonable doubt the minister may proceed. It 
may be added that the sacraments are to be refused also to 
persons who may be reasonably supposed to have contracted 
marriage " otherwise," in any respect. " than as the Word of 
God and the discipline of this Church doth allow." These 
impediments are nowhere defined ; and accordingly it has hap- 
pened that a man who had married a deceased wife's sister 



vv 



112 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

and the woman he had married were, by the private judgment 
of a priest, refused the holy communion. The c;vil courts do 
not seem inclined to protect the clergy from consequences of 
interference with the civil law. In Southbridge, Mass. , a few 
weeks ago,*a man who had been denounced from the altar for 
marrying again after a divorce obtained a judgment for $1,720 
damages. The law of the church would seem to be that, even 
though a legal divorce may have been obtained, remarriage is 
absolutely forbidden, excepting to the innocent party, whether 
man or woman, in a divorce for adultery. The penalty for 
breach of this law might involve, for the officiating clergyman, 
deposition from the ministry; for the offending man or woman, 
exclusion from the sacraments, which, in the judgment of a 
very large number of the clergy, involves everlasting dam- 
nation. 

It is obvious, then, that the Protestant Episcopal Church 
allows the complete validity of a divorce a vinculo in the case 
of adultery, and the right of remarriage to the innocent party. 
But that church has not determined in what manner either the 
grounds of the divorce or the ■ ' innocence ' ' of either party is 
to be ascertained. The canon does not require a clergyman 
to demand, nor can the church enable him to secure, the pro- 
duction of a copy of the record or decree of the court of law 
by which a divorce is granted, nor would such decree indicate 
the "innocence" of one party, though it might prove the 
guilt of the other. 

The effect of divorce upon the integrity of the family is too 
obvious to require stating. As the father and mother are the 
heads of the family, their separation must inevitably destroy 
the common family life. On the other hand, it is often con- 
tended that the destruction has been already completed, and 
that a divorce is only the legal recognition of what has already 
taken place ; ' ' the integrity of the family ' ' can scarcely 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 113 

remain when either a father or mother, or both, are living in 
violation of the law on which that integrity rests. The ques- 
tion may be asked whether the absolute prohibition of divorce 
would contribute to the moral purity of society. It is difficult 
to answer such a question, because anything on the subject 
must be comparatively worthless until verified by experience. 
It is quite certain that the prohibition of divorce never pre- 
vents illicit sexual connections, as was abundantly proved 
when divorce in England was put within the reach of persons 
who were not able to afford the expense of a special act of 
Parliament. It is, indeed, so palpable a fact that any amount 
of evidence or argument is wholly superfluous. 

The law of the Protestant Episcopal Church is by no means 
identical with the opinion of either the clergy or the laity. In 
the judgment of many, the existing law is far too lax, or, at 
least, the whole doctrine of marriage is far too inadequately 
dealt with in the authoritative teaching of the church. The 
opinion of this school finds, perhaps, its most adequate expres- 
sion in the report of a committee of the last General Conven- 
tion forming Appendix XIII. of the "Journal" of that con- 
vention. It is, substantially, that the Mosaic law of marriage 
is still binding upon the church, unless directly abrogated by 
Christ himself ; that it was abrogated by him only so far that 
all divorce was forbidden by him, excepting for the cause of 
fornication ; that a woman might not claim divorce for any 
reason whatever ; that the marriage of a divorced person until 
the death of the other party is wholly forbidden ; that mar- 
riage is not merely a civil contract, but a spiritual and super- 
natural union, requiring for its mutual obligation a supernatu- 
ral, divine grace ; that such grace is only imparted in the 
sacrament of matrimony, which is a true sacrament and does 
actually confer grace ; that marriage is wholly within the juris- 
diction of the church, though the State may determine such 



!■ 



114 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

rules and guarantees as may secure publicity and sufficient 
evidence of a marriage, etc. ; that severe penalties should be 
inflicted by the State, on the demand of the church, for the 
suppression of all offences against the seventh commandment 
and sundry other parts of the Mosaic legislation, especially in 
relation to "prohibited degrees." 

There is another school, equally earnest and sincere in its 
zeal for the integrity of the family and sexual purity, which 
would nevertheless repudiate much the greater part of the 
above assumption. This school, if one may so venture to com- 
bine scattered opinions, argues substantially as follows : The 
type of all Mosaic legislation was circumcision ; that rite was 
of universal obligation and divine authority. St. Paul so 
regarded it. The abrogation of the law requiring circumcision 
was, therefore, the abrogation of the whole of the Mosaic legis- 
lation. The "burden of proof," therefore, rests upon those 
who affirm the present obligation of what formed a part of the 
Mosaic law ; and they must show that it has been reenacted by 
Christ and his Apostles or forms some part of some other and 
independent system of law or morals still in force. Christ's 
words about divorce are not to be construed as a positive law, 
but as expressing the ideal of marriage, and corresponding to 
his words about eunuchs, which not everybody " can receive." 
So far as Christ's words seem to indicate an inequality as to 
divorce between man and woman, they are explained by the 
authoritative and inspired assertion of St. Paul : " In Christ 
Jesus there is neither male nor female." A divine law is 
equally authoritative by whomsoever declared — whether by 
the Son Incarnate or by the Holy Ghost speaking through 
inspired Apostles. If, then, a divine law was ever capable of 
suspension or modification, it may still be capable of such sus- 
pension or modification in corresponding circumstances. The 
circumstances which justified a modification of the original 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 115 

divine law of marriage do still exist in many conditions of soci- 
ety and even of individual life. The Protestant Episcopal 
Church cannot, alone, speak with such authority on disputed 
passages of Scripture as to justify her ministers in direct dis- 
obedience to the civil authority, which is also "ordained of 
God." The exegesis of the early church was closely con- 
nected with theories about matter, and about the inferiority of 
women and of married life, which are no longer believed. 

Of course this is a very brief statement. As a matter of fact 
the actual effect of the doctrine and discipline of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church on marriage and divorce is that divorce 
among her members is excessively rare ; that it is regarded 
with extreme aversion ; and that the public opinion of the 
church maintains the law as it now is, but could not be trusted 
to execute laws more stringent. A member of the committee 
of the General Convention whose report has been already 
referred to closes that report with the following protest : 

" The undersigned finds himself unable to concur in so much of the 
[proposed] canon as forbids the holy communion to a truly pious and 
godly woman who has been compelled by long years of suffering from 
a drunken and brutal husband to obtain a divorce, and has regularly 
married some suitable person according to the established laws of the 
land. And also from so much of the [proposed] canon as may seem 
to forbid marriage with a deceased wife's sister." 

The final action on these points, which has already been stated, 
indicates that the proposed report thus referred to was, in one 
particular at least, in advance of the sentiment of the church 
as expressed in her General Convention. 

Henry C. Potter. 



Question (i.) Do you believe in the principle of divorce 
under any circumstances 9 ' ' 

The world for the most part is ruled by the tomb, and the 
living are tyrannized over by the dead. Old ideas, long after 



^^m 



Il6 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

the conditions under which they were produced have passed 
away, often persist in surviving. Many are disposed to wor- 
ship the ancient — to follow the old paths, without inquiring 
where they lead, and without knowing exactly where they 
wish to go themselves. 

Opinions on the subject of divorce have been for the most 
part inherited from the early Christians, They have come 
to us through theological and priestly channels. The early 
Christians believed that the world was about to be destroyed, 
or that it was to be purified by fire ; that all the wicked were 
to perish, and that the good were to be caught up in the air 
to meet their Lord — to remain there, in all probability, until 
the earth was prepared as a habitation for the blessed. With 
this thought or belief in their minds, the things of this world 
were of comparatively no importance. The man who built 
larger barns in which to store his grain was regarded as a fool- 
ish farmer, who had forgotten, in his greed for gain, the value 
of his own soul. They regarded prosperous people as the 
children of Mammon, and the unfortunate, the wretched and 
diseased, as the favorites of God. They discouraged all 
worldly pursuits, except the soliciting of alms. There was no 
time to marry or to be given in marriage ; no time to build 
homes and have families. All their thoughts were centered 
upon the heaven they expected to inherit. Business, love, all 
secular things, fell into disrepute. 

Nothing is said in the Testament about the families of the 
Apostles ; nothing of family life, of the sacredness of home ; 
nothing about the necessity of education, the improvement and 
development of the mind. These things were forgotten, for 
the reason that nothing, in the presence of the expected event, 
was considered of any importance, except to be ready when 
the Son of Man should come. Such was the feeling, that 
rewards were offered by Christ himself to those who would 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 1 17 

desert their wives and children. Human love was spoken of 
with contempt. "Let the dead bury their dead. What is 
that to thee ? Follow thou me." They not only believed 
these things, but acled in accordance with them ; and, as a 
consequence, all the relations of life were denied or avoided, 
and their obligations disregarded. Marriage was discour- 
aged. It was regarded as only one degree above open and 
unbridled vice, and was allowed only in consideration of 
human weakness. It was thought far better not to marry — 
that it was something grander for a man to love God than to 
love woman. The exceedingly godly, the really spiritual, 
believed in celibacy, and held the opposite sex in a kind of 
pious abhorrence. And yet, with that inconsistency so char- 
acteristic of theologians, marriage was held to be a sacrament. 
The priest said to the man who married : ' ' Remember that 
you are caught for life. This door opens but once. Before 
this den ot matrimony the tracks are all one way." This was 
in the nature of a punishment for having married. The theo- 
logian felt that the contract of marriage, if not contrary to 
God's command, was at least contrary to his advice, and that 
the married ought to suffer in some way, as a matter of justice. 
The fact that there could be no divorce, that a mistake could 
not be corrected, was held up as a warning. At every wed- 
ding feast this skeleton stretched its fleshless finger towards 
bride and groom. 

Nearly all intelligent people have given up the idea that the 
world is about to come to an end. They do not now believe 
that prosperity is a certain sign of wickedness, or that poverty 
and wretchedness are sure certificates of virtue. They are 
hardly convinced that Dives should have been sent to hell 
simply for being rich, or that Lazarus was entitled to eternal 
joy on account of his poverty. We now know that prosper- 
ous people may be good, and that unfortunate people may be 



1 18 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

bad. We have reached the conclusion that the practice of 
virtue tends in the direction of prosperity, and that a violation 
of the conditions of well-being brings, with absolute certainty, 
wretchedness and misfortune. 

There was a time when it was believed that the sin of an 
individual was visited upon the tribe, the community, or the 
nation to which he belonged. It was then thought that if a 
man or woman had made a vow to God, and had failed to keep 
the vow, God might punish the entire community; therefore 
it was the business of the community to see to it that the vow 
was kept. That idea has been abandoned. As we progress, 
the rights of the individual are perceived, and we are now be- 
ginning dimly to discern that there are no rights higher than 
the rights of the individual. There was a time when nearly 
all believed in the reforming power of punishment — in the 
beneficence of brute force. But the world is changing. It 
was at one time thought that the Inquisition was the saviour 
of society ; that the persecution of the philosopher was requi- 
site to the preservation of the state, and that, no matter what 
happened, the state should be preserved. We have now more 
light. And standing upon this luminous point that we call 
the present, let me answer your questions. 

Marriage is the most important, the most sacred, contract 
that human beings can make. No matter whether we call it a 
contract, or a sacrament, or both, it remains precisely the 
same. And no matter whether this contract is entered into 
in the presence of magistrate or priest, it is exactly the same. 
A true marriage is a natural concord and agreement of souls, 
a harmony in which discord is not even imagined ; it is a 
mingling so perfect that only one seems to exist ; all other 
considerations are lost ; the present seems to be eternal. In 
this supreme moment there is no shadow — or the shadow is 
as luminous as light. And when two beings thus love, thus 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 119 

unite, this is the true marriage of soul and soul. That which 
is said before the altar, or minister, or magistrate, or in the 
presence of witnesses, is only the outward evidence of that 
which has already happened within ; it simply testifies to a 
union that has already taken place — to the uniting of two 
mornings of hope to reach the night together. Each has 
found the ideal ; the man has found the one woman of all 
the world — the impersonation of affection, purity, passion, 
love, beauty, and grace ; and the woman has found the one 
man of all the world, her ideal, and all that she knows of ro- 
mance, of art, courage, heroism, honesty, is realized in him. 
The idea of contract is lost. Duty and obligation are 
instantly changed into desire and joy, and two lives, like 
uniting streams, flow on as one. Nothing can add to the 
sacredness of this marriage, to the obligation and duty of each 
to each. There is nothing in the ceremony except the desire 
on the part of the man and woman that the whole world 
should know that they are really married and that their souls 
have been united. 

Every marriage, for a thousand reasons, should be public, 
should be recorded, should be known ; but, above all, to the 
end that the purity of the union should appear. These cere- 
monies are not only for the good and for the protection of 
the married, but also for the protection of their children, and 
of society as well. But, after all, the marriage remains a con- 
tract of the highest possible character — a contract in which 
each gives and receives a heart. 

The question then arises, Should this marriage, under any 
circumstances, be dissolved ? It is easy to understand the 
position taken by the various churches ; but back of theolog- 
ical opinions is the question of contract. 

In this contract of marriage, the man agrees to protect and 
cherish his wife. Suppose that he refuses to protect ; that he 



120 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

abuses, assaults, and tramples upon the woman hewed. What 
is her redress ? Is she under any obligation to him ? He has 
violated the contract. He has failed to protect, and, in addi- 
tion, he has assaulted her like a wild beast. Is she under any 
obligation to him ? Is she bound by the contract he has 
broken ? If so, what is the consideration for this obligation ? 
Must she live with him for his sake ? or, if she leaves him to 
preserve her life, must she remain his wife for his sake ? No 
intelligent man will answer these questions in the affirmative. 
If, then, she is not bound to remain his wife for the hus- 
band's sake, is she bound to remain his wife because the mar- 
riage was a sacrament ? Is there any obligation on the part 
of the wife to remain with the brutal husband for the sake of 
God ? Can her conduct affect in any way the happiness of an 
infinite being ? Is it possible for a human being to increase or 
diminish the well-being of the Infinite? 

The next question is as to the right of society in this mat- 
ter. It must be admitted that the peace of society will be pro- 
moted by the separation of such people. Certainly society 
cannot insist upon a wife remaining with a husband who 
bruises and mangles her flesh. Even married women have a 
right to personal security. They do not lose, either by con- 
tract or sacrament, the right of self-preservation ; this they 
share in common, to say the least of it, with the lowest living 
creatures. 

This will probably be admitted by most of the enemies of 
divorce ; but they will insist that while the wife has the right 
to flee from her husband's roof and seek protection of kindred 
or friends, the marriage — the sacrament — must remain un- 
broken. Is it to the interest of society that those who despise 
each other should live together ? Ought the world to be peo- 
pled by the children of hatred or disgust, the children of lust 
and loathing, or by the welcome babes of mutual love ? Is it 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 121 

possible that an infinitely wise and compassionate God insists 
that a helpless woman shall remain the wife of a cruel wretch ? 
Can this add to the joy of Paradise, or tend to keep one harp 
in tune ? Can anything be more infamous than for a govern- 
ment to compel a woman to remain the wife of a man she 
hates — of one whom she justly holds in abhorrence ? Does 
any decent man wish the assistance of a constable, a sheriff, a 
judge, or a church, to keep his wife in his house ? Is it pos- 
sible to conceive of a more contemptible human being than a 
man who would appeal to force in such a case ? It may be 
said that the woman is free to go, and that the courts will pro- 
tect her from the brutality of the man who promised to be her 
protector ; but where shall the woman go ? She may have no 
friends ; or they may be poor ; her kindred may be dead. 
Has she no right to build another home? Must this woman, 
full of kindness, affection, health, be tied and chained to this 
living corpse ? Is there no future for her ? Must she be an 
outcast forever — deceived and betrayed for her whole life ? 
Can she never sit by her own hearth, with the arms of her 
children about her neck, and with a husband who loves and 
protects her? Is she to become a social pariah, and is this 
for the benefit of society ? — or is it for the sake of the wretch 
who destroyed her life ? 

The ground has been taken that woman would lose her dig- 
nity if marriage could be annulled. Is it necessary to lose 
your liberty in order to retain your moral character — in order 
to be pure and womanly ? Must a woman, in order to retain 
her virtue, become a slave, a serf, with a beast for a master, or 
with society for a master, or with a phantom for a master ? 

If an infinite being is one or the parties to the contract, is it 
not the duty of this being to see to it that the contract is car- 
ried out ? What consideration does the infinite being give ? 
What consideration does he receive ? If a wife owes no duty 



122 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

to her husband because the husband has violated the contract, 
and has even assaulted her life, is it possible for her to feel 
toward him any real thrill of affection ? If she does not, what 
is there left of marriage ? What part of this contract or sac- 
rament remains in living force ? She can not sustain the rela- 
tion of wife, because she abhors him ; she cannot remain 
under the same roof, for fear that she may be killed. They 
sustain, then, only the relations of hunter and hunted — of 
tyrant and victim. Is it desirable that this relation should 
last through life, and that it should be rendered sacred by the 
ceremony of a church ? 

Again I ask, Is it desirable to have families raised under 
such circumstances ? Are we in need of children born of such 
parents ? Can the virtue of others be preserved only by this 
destruction of happiness, by this perpetual imprisonment ? 

A marriage without love is bad enough, and a marriage for 
wealth or position is low enough ; but what shall we say of 
a marriage where the parties actually abhor each other ? Is 
there any morality in this ? any virtue in this ? Is there vir- 
tue in retaining the name of wife, or husband, without the real 
and true relation ? Will any good man say, will any good 
woman declare, that a true, loving woman should be com- 
pelled to be the mother of children whose father she detests ? 
Is there a good woman in the world who would not shrink 
from this herself ; and is there a woman so heartless and so 
immoral that she would force another to bear that from which 
she would shudderingly and shriekingly shrink ? 

Marriages are made by men and women ; not by society ; 
not by the state ; not by the church ; not by supernatural 
beings. By this time we should know that nothing is moral 
that does not tend to the well-being of sentient beings ; that 
nothing is virtuous the result of which is not good. We know 
now, if we know anything, that all the reasons for doing 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 1 23 

right, and all the reasons against doing wrong, are here in 
this world. We should have imagination enough to put our- 
selves in the place of another. Let a man suppose himself a 
helpless woman beaten by a brutal husband — would he advo- 
cate divorces then ? 

Few people have an adequate idea of the sufferings of women 
and children, of the number of wives who tremble when they 
hear the footsteps of a returning husband, of the number of 
children who hide when they hear the voice of a father. Few 
people know the number of blows that fall on the flesh of the 
helpless every day, and few know the nights of terror passed 
by mothers who hold babes to their breasts. Compared with 
these, all the hardships of poverty borne by those who love 
each other are as nothing. Men and women truly married 
bear the sufferings and misfortunes of poverty together. They 
console each other. In the darkest «ight they see the radiance 
of a star, and their affection gives to the heart of each per- 
petual sunshine. 

The good home is the unit of the good government. The 
hearth-stone is the corner-stone of civilization. Society is not 
interested in the preservation of hateful homes, of homes 
where husbands and wives are selfish, cold, and cruel. It is 
not to the interest of society that good women should be en- 
slaved, that they should live in fear, or that they should be- 
come mothers by husbands whom they hate. Homes should 
be filled with kind and generous fathers, with true and loving 
mothers ; and when they are so filled, the world will be civi- 
lized. Intelligence will rock the cradle ; justice will sit in the 
courts ; wisdom in the legislative halls ; and above all and 
over all, like the dome of heaven, will be the spirit of liberty. 

Although marriage is the most important and the most 
sacred contract that human beings can make, still when that 
contract has been violated, courts should have the power to 
declare it null and void upon such conditions as may be just. 



124 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

As a rule, the woman dowers the husband with her youth, 
her beauty, her love — with all she has ; and from this con- 
tract certainly the husband should never be released, unless 
the wife has broken the conditions of that contract. Divorces 
should be granted publicly, precisely as the marriage should 
be solemnized. Every marriage should be known, and there 
should be witnesses, to the end that the character of the con- 
tract entered into should be understood ; the record should 
be open and public. And the same is true of divorces. The 
conditions should be determined, the property should be 
divided by a court of equity, and the custody of the children 
given under regulations prescribed. 

Men and women are not virtuous by law. Law does not of 
itself create virtue, nor is it the foundation or fountain of love. 
Law should protect virtue, and law should protect the wife, if 
she has kept her contract, and the husband, if he has fulfilled 
his. But the death of love is the end of marriage. Love is 
natural. Back of all ceremony burns and will forever burn 
the sacred flame. There has been no time in the world's his- 
tory when that torch was extinguished. In all ages, in all 
climes, among all people, there has been true, pure, and un- 
selfish love. Long before a ceremony was thought of, long 
before a priest existed, there were true and perfect marriages. 
Back of public opinion is natural modesty, the affections of the 
heart ; and in spite of all law, there is and forever will be the 
realm of choice. Wherever love is, it is pure ; and every- 
where, and at all times, the ceremony of marriage testifies to 
that which has happened within the temple of the human heart. 

Question (2). Ought divorced people to be allowed to marry 
under any circumstances f 

This depends upon whether marriage is a crime. If it is 
not a crime, why should any penalty be attached ? Can any 
one conceive of any reason why a woman obtaining a divorce, 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 1 25 

without fault on her part, should be compelled as a punish- 
ment to remain forever single ? Why should she be punished 
for the dishonesty or brutality of another ? Why should a man 
who faithfully kept his contract of marriage, and who was 
deserted by an unfaithful wife, be punished for the benefit of 
society ? Why should he be doomed to live without a home ? 
There is still another view. We must remember that human 
passions are the same after as before divorce. To prevent 
remarriage is to give excuse for vice. 

Question (3). What is the effect of divorce upon the integ- 
rity of the family ? 

The real marriage is back of the ceremony, and the real 
divorce is back of the decree. When love is dead, when hus- 
band and wife abhor each other, they are divorced. The 
decree records in a judicial way what has really taken place, 
just as the ceremony of marriage attests a contract already 
made. 

The true family is the result of the true marriage, and the 
institution of the family should above all things be preserved. 
What becomes of the sacredness of the home, if the law com- 
pels those who abhor each other to sit at the same hearth ? 
This lowers the standard, and changes the happy haven of 
home into the prison-cell. If we wish to preserve the integ- 
rity of the family, we must preserve the democracy of the fire- 
side, the republicanism of the home, the absolute and perfect 
equality of husband and wife. There must be no exhibition 
of force, no spectre of fear. The mother must not remain 
through an order ol court, or the command of a priest, or by 
virtue of the tyranny of society ; she must sit in absolute 
freedom, the queen of herself, the sovereign of her own soul 
and of her own body. Real homes can never be preserved 
through force, through slavery, or superstition. Nothing can 
be more sacred than a home, no altar purer than the hearth. 



126 IS DIVORCE WRONG? 

Question (4). Does the absolute prohibition of divorce where 
it exists contribute to the moral purity of society f 

We must define our terms. What is moral purity ? The 
intelligent of this world seek the well-being of themselves and 
others. They know that happiness is the only good ; and this 
they strive to attain. To live in accordance with the condi- 
tions of well-being is moral in the highest sense. To use the 
best instrumentalities to attain the highest ends is our highest 
conception of the moral. In other words, morality is the mel- 
ody of the perfection of conduct. A man is not moral because 
he is obedient through fear or ignorance. Morality lives in 
the realm of perceived obligation, and where a being acts 
in accordance with perceived obligation, that being is moral. 
Morality is not the child of slavery. Ignorance is not the cor- 
ner stone of virtue. 

The first duty of a human being is to himself. He must see 
to it that he does not become a burden upon others, To be 
self-respecting, he must endeavor to be self-sustaining. If by 
his industry and intelligence he accumulates a margin, then he 
is under obligation to do with that margin all the good he can. 
He who lives to the ideal does the best he can. In true mar- 
riage men and women give not only their bodies, but their 
souls. This is the ideal marriage ; this is moral. They 
who give their bodies, but not their souls, are not married, 
whatever the ceremony may be ; this is immoral. 

If this be true, upon what principle can a woman continue 
to sustain the relation of wife after love is dead ? Is there 
some other consideration that can take the place of genuine 
affection? Can she be bribed with money, or a home, or 
position, or by public opinion, and still remain a virtuous wo- 
man ? Is it for the good of society that virtue should be thus 
crucified between church and state ? Can it be said that this 
contributes to the moral purity of the human race ? 



IS DIVORCE WRONG? 127 

Is there a higher standard of virtue in countries where 
divorce is prohibited than in those where it is granted ? 
Where husbands and wives who have ceased to love cannot 
be divorced, there are mistresses and lovers. 

The sacramental view of marriage is the shield of vice. The 
world looks at the wife who has been abused, who has been 
driven from the home of her husband, and the world pities ; 
and when this wife is loved by some other man, the world 
excuses. So, too, the husband who cannot live in peace, who 
leaves his home, is pitied and excused. 

Is it possible to conceive of anything more immoral than for 
a husband to insist on living with a wife who has no love for 
him ? Is not this a perpetual crime ? Is the wife to lose her 
personality ? Has she no right of choice ? Is her modesty 
the property of another ? Is the man she hates the lord of 
her desire ? Has she no right to guard the jewels of her soul? 
Is there a depth below this ? And is this the foundation of 
morality ? this the corner-stone of society ? this the arch that 
supports the dome of civilization ? Is this pathetic sacrifice 
on the one hand, this sacrilege on the other, pleasing in the 
sight of heaven ? 

To me, the tenderest word in our language, the most pa- 
thetic fact within our knowledge, is maternity. Around this 
sacred word cluster the joys and sorrows, the agonies and 
ecstasies, of the human race. The mother walks in the 
shadow of death that she may give another life. Upon the 
altar of love she puts her own life in pawn. When the world 
is civilized, no one will become a mother against her will. 
Man will then know that to enslave another is to imprison 
himself. 

Robert G. Ingersoll. 



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